


In an Apartment on Los R'obles...

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, Crack, Crossover, F/F, M/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-07 12:43:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompted by damalur: "something something Big Bang Theory characters in a Lovecraft setting?" I strongly suggest reading the tags before you read this, just in case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



> The Big Bang Theory characters belong to that one dude, and the Cthulhu Mythos belongs to that one other dude.
> 
> * * *

“What do you mean, the store was out of soy sauce?”

“I don’t know, Sheldon, in English it means that the store didn’t have any more soy sauce, but maybe it means something totally different on whatever planet you’re from!” Leonard has that  _not this shit again_  look on his face.

“ _I’m_  from  _Earth_ ,” Sheldon says, sounding miffed. Penny groans internally and gets up from the couch.

“Maybe there’s some in the cupboard,” she suggests, mostly to herself because the boys are engaged in a glaring match, and goes to check. If this is going to be one of Sheldon’s more epic tantrums, she’s just glad that they don't have more of an audience.

“I get that you’re dealing with being OCD, but this is downright ridiculous!” Leonard’s voice is getting louder. Penny paws through the cupboard. Peanut butter, jelly, lemon curd, a couple thousand other jars and bottles -- seriously, how do they all fit, it’s like some kind of TARDIS in there or something -- but there is a definite lack of soy sauce.

“Ridiculous? You’re calling my rituals ridiculous?”

“There’s no soy sauce,” Penny says, going back and sitting down. Her own dinner is calling to her. “Sheldon, you’ll just have to go without. It’s not like one night is going to give you a deficiency.”

He turns his glare on her. Funny, she’s never noticed that thin red line around the blue of his irises before. “You have  _no idea_  what deficiencies my body may or may not react badly to.”

“Oh, for--”

“Penny,” Leonard interrupts, shredding a napkin between his fingers. “You might not want to antagonize him while he’s PMSing.”

That does it. “Sheldon? PMSing? Ex _cuse_  me, but you can’t just appropriate terminology to--”

Sheldon’s stomach growls.

Like, not a regular  _I need food_  growl. This is a full-bodied  _snarl_ , and it’s directed at her.

Leonard sighs. “Sheldon. Calm down. Penny’s going to go and find your soy sauce for you.”

“Like hell Penny is,” Penny says. She’s still on the couch but now, she realizes, she’s sitting on the arm, and her feet are tucked up on the seat, ready to jump. “What  _was_  that?”

Sheldon hisses at her.

“Whoa. Calm down, buddy.” Leonard puts his hand on Sheldon’s shoulder. Something whips out of the collar of Sheldon’s shirts and slaps it away, and it sure as shit isn’t Sheldon’s hand. “Okay... it’s okay... Penny,  _run_.”

She’s seen enough Doctor Who to know that that word in that tone of voice precludes fucking around, throws herself backward, and  _runs_.

Her apartment has a lock and a chain and a baseball bat. She secures the former two, picks up the latter, and then stops moving altogether when she hears a thin scream from across the hall.

She can’t leave Leonard alone over there, even if she has no idea what’s going on. But there’s something she needs before she goes anywhere. She rakes through her own cupboards with her free hand, because no way is she putting the bat down, and finds what she’s searching for. She jams the bottle into her jeans pocket.

Then she takes a deep breath, opens the door again, and walks back across the hall.

The boys’ door is open a little way. Penny peeks through the gap. Leonard’s still in his seat but there’s something coiled around his throat and Sheldon is leaning over him and she can see that Leonard’s face is mottled purple even from across the room. Sheldon’s midsection is bulging and writhing, held back only by what he has assured her is a  _hilarious_  image of a Ferris wheel all made out of lines and letters.

She doesn’t think, she just moves. Three bounding steps to the couch, one up onto the seat, and Sheldon’s head whirls around to her and she sees his eyes are fucking  _glowing_  now, right before she nails him between them with the bat. His head snaps back on his neck and he falls back, out for the count. Penny uses her forward momentum instead of letting it fell her, dropping into a shoulder-roll across the coffee table and landing on her feet, bat cocked back over her shoulder in case she needs to hit him again.

In the middle of it all she has time to think that hey, if she ever lands an action movie part, she can do her own stunts.

The thing is still around Leonard’s neck and Penny tosses the bat aside, grabs the end of the thing, and starts untwisting it. She will not think tentacle. She will _not_. Not when the other end of the thing disappears underneath the hem of Sheldon’s shirts.

Leonard coughs and coughs and overbalances into her arms. She holds him, and gropes with one hand for his bottle of water, and rubs his back as he gulps greedily and then throws up into her hair.

“What the hell is that thing and what the hell did it do with Sheldon?”

“That  _is_  Sheldon,” Leonard croaks.

“What.”

“He’s going through Pre-Madness Syndrome.”

“You couldn’t have come up with something more creative?”

“You try being creative when your roommate’s attempting to throw you across the kitchen because his chicken’s the wrong shape.”

“Point.” The comment about the chicken makes Penny remember what she brought over from her own kitchen. She has to let go of Leonard to get to Sheldon, but considering the sigh of relief that she hears when she inverts the soy sauce bottle over Sheldon’s mouth and squeezes, Leonard doesn’t mind.

(She sure as shit minds that he threw up on her, but under the circumstances it’s the least of her worries.)

Sheldon gurgles a little. Penny looks around for the bat, which landed near the door, but Sheldon doesn’t move. The bulges under his shirts are subsiding, though, and she can’t see any more -- all right,  _tentacles_  -- poking out of anywhere. There’s an ugly goose egg on his forehead, but he seems to be breathing normally.

Leonard hauls himself to his feet via the coffee table. “I think he’ll be all right now.”

“Yeah, all right for a whatever the hell he is.”

“He’s just Sheldon,” Leonard says. “Just Sheldon.” He sits down on the couch and smooths Sheldon’s hair back from his forehead in an unexpectedly tender gesture.

“Then what was -- what were -- just fucking explain what just happened, okay?”

“Well, uh. PMS is Pre-Madness Syndrome, it’s what happens if it seems like the containment rituals aren’t going to be performed correctly. His food, his TV shows, everything -- it’s all part of keeping a routine together that, you know, keeps things in equilibrium.”

“Keeps  _what_  in equilibrium.” If he doesn’t get to the point soon she’s going to hit him with the bat as well.

“Well, he’s an OCD.”

“Don’t you mean he  _has_  OCD?”

“No. Oviductal C-- Depository.” The word in the middle sounds like he’s gargling with soggy feta cheese and is in no way shape or form English.

“Say what now?”

Leonard gives her a faintly impatient look. “He’s an egg-bearer, Penny. He’s incubating the eggs of -- well. There are a lot of names, but Great Old Ones is the easiest to pronounce. They take a long time to gestate, but they’ve been getting restless lately, so I don’t think it’ll be much longer.”

Penny edges toward the bat. “Uh-huh. Right. I see.”

“Oh,  _good_. Maybe I’ll be able to break it to Howard and Raj with your help. Howard keeps bringing him the wrong pizza and I’m sure one day he’ll just snap.” Leonard rests his hand on Sheldon’s stomach. “I think they’ve stopped moving. Lie dreaming, little ones,” he croons.

“So he’s an egg-bearer even though he’s a guy?”

“Any human can be an egg-bearer. It’s just a matter of rearranging some internal organs.”

“And, uh. He told you all of this when?”

Leonard smiles gently at her. “When I was asking him to mate with me, silly. Why else would I still be living with him?”

Penny desperately wants to say, “What?” again, but her flight instincts have kicked in and she’s halfway down the stairs, bat in hand, before she realizes that she’s even moved.

She stops, panting, outside the building, and looks up at the light streaming from the window of 4A. She thinks that she can hear very faint singing, a lullaby by the sound of it, in a language that makes her spine prickle.

She has the clothes she’s standing up in, her baseball bat, and Leonard’s vomit in her hair, but she also knows exactly who else in Pasadena has an encyclopedic knowledge of this kind of shit, and if she hurries she can probably catch him before his store closes.


	2. Chapter 2

Stuart hears her out without so much as laughing, and is pressing buttons on his phone before she’s finished.

“Yeah, hi, L, it’s S. We have a situation.” He looks at Penny, taking in her disheveled appearance and the dried vomit. “It’s serious all right. Fif _teen_? Try for _ten_. I’ll get the stuff together here.” He hangs up and pushes his keys across the counter. “Go upstairs and clean up. You should stay up there.”

“That’s not happening,” Penny says.

He nods, like he’d expected no less. “At least get that crap off you. We’re pretty sure they can smell it, and the element of surprise counts for a lot.”

Penny goes up to his tiny apartment over the store, takes the fastest shower of her life (not, however, neglecting the shampoo), and puts her own jeans back on but snags one of Stuart’s t-shirts off what she hopes is the clean stack. It says CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON across the front. That’s easy; her bat hasn’t left her side.

When she gets back down the stairs, the lights are all out, except for the glow from the back room. She walks between the silent racks and calls out before she reaches the door, just in case.

Stuart’s ditched his customary plaid for a battered black leather jacket. His fashion choices aren’t her primary concern, though; the huge fuck-off rack of guns behind him is. As is the woman currently perusing them.

“ _Leslie_?”

“No names, Barbie,” Leslie snaps. She pulls down a shotgun, her hands quick and competent. “We don’t know if the store’s bugged.”

“It’s not,” Stuart says patiently, as if he’s told her before. Leslie makes a disparaging noise and yanks her own similarly ragged jacket aside to shove a handgun into its holster. She takes a sideways step and snags a third jacket off a hook, tossing it at Penny.

“If you must come, wear that.”

“Why?”

“Corrosive saliva,” Stuart says. He’s slotting fresh batteries into a taser. “L, I told you already, we need her knowledge of the location.”

“I’m sure she could draw a map.”

Penny shrugs into the jacket. “Get real, L. I’m coming with you.”

“Besides, you know how much trouble we’ll get in if you don’t stick to containment and capture instead of disposal? Do I have to remind you what happened in Altadena?”

Leslie re-racks the shotgun, grabs something instead that looks like it came off the _Ghostbusters_ set. “ _Nooo_ , Possum.”

“I told you not to fucking well call me that.”

Penny blinks. Tasers and leather are one thing, but Stuart swearing? What is her life, even.

“Pick a gun and let’s go, Barbie.”

Penny scans the racks. “You don’t have a noisy cricket?”

Stuart laughs. Leslie just gives her a baleful look and says, “S, you should just shoot her now; they’ve obviously brainwashed her already.”

There’s a handgun like the one her mom had – not for home defence, they had shotguns for that – but it’ll do. “What _did_ happen in Altadena?”

Stuart and Leslie exchange a Look. Finally Leslie sighs. “Wolowitz’s mom wasn’t happy that her son was dating outside his species.”

* * *

The drive back to Los Robles is too short to find out much more, other than that they think Raj is human, probably, but other than that Penny is friends with a whole nest of what Stuart calls “eldritches” and what Leslie calls “fucked-up shit”. Bernadette’s into xenobiology. Amy’s apparently some kind of OB-GYN when she’s not working out ways to invade the human brain, and has been overseeing Sheldon’s pregnancy. If Los Robles is a nest, then Caltech’s a fucking hive.

“Why do... how come you’re not supposed to just kill them?”

“They’re too damn smart. Like it or not, when they’re not devising ways to take over the planet, they’re pretty useful to humanity.” Leslie takes the corner a little too sharply even for a van equipped with roll bars.

“Plus it’s easier to have them where we can keep an eye on them,” Stuart adds. “Sending actual hunters after them only scares them off and if they’re running wild, well...”

He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. She gets it.

* * *

4A is dark, and there’s nobody outside or on the first flight of stairs.

“What if they’ve left?” Penny asks.

Leslie rolls her eyes, crosses the foyer, and yanks the elevator door open. Penny’s heard the story, she knows to expect maybe a blown-up shell or something, but instead there’s a quartet of TV screens and a mess of wires. She’s still staring when Stuart catches her hand and pulls her into the small space, dragging the door closed behind them.

“This is dangerous enough without standing out in the open.”

“Yeah, some kind of containment procedure against two of my best friends is going to be _so_ hard, especially when one of them’s _pregnant_. Seriously, they’re like the least athletic people ever.”

Stuart shakes his head at her. “You don’t know.” He touches her jacket with a fingertip. Her convenient spare jacket, almost pristine when the other two look like they’ve been run over by an angry bulldozer. Twice. “Do you remember Lonely Larry? He used to hang out in the store?”

Penny can only shake her head.

“We lost him in Altadena.” Leslie is skipping backward through a recording, finger stuttering on the play/pause button. “Basically? You don’t want to piss off Mama Freakshow.”

Penny looks down and checks the loads of her gun, making sure the extra clips are readily accessible, distributed in her jacket pockets. “Why is it only you two?”

“It’s, uh. Not exactly a role with a high survival rate.” Stuart gives her a not quite convincing smile.

“We could call for backup, but the nearest I can think of is in Nevada, and he’s got his hands full with that – was it a video arcade?”

“Bowling alley.”

“Whatever.” Leslie apparently finds whatever she was looking for in the recording. “Bingo.” She taps the screen. “There you go, Barbie – your dignified exit.”

Penny looks at the frozen image of herself bolting from the apartment, bat in hand. Even in black and white she looks like shit. “And no sign of them after that?”

“Nope. So, unless there’s another way out...”

“Fire escape? Roof? Can they, I don’t know, fly?”

“We don’t know that they _can’t_ ,” Stuart says, “but it’s safer – well, preferable – to assume that they can’t.”

* * *

She ends up drawing them a map anyway, because it’s easier.

* * *

Five minutes later Penny’s standing in front of the door to 4A with Stuart, and Leslie is, presumably, getting into position on the fire escape.

“You’re probably not going to like our first approach.”

“What’s that?”

“Bait,” Stuart says simply, grabbing her by the ponytail and thumping on the door.

She doesn’t have time to yell at him but she knows her face is anger-scarlet as the door squeaks open. Leonard’s in his bathrobe and everything.

“ _Stuart_?”

“She came to me for help.” Stuart shakes her a little, and when she attempts to bite him it’s totally not feigned at all. “I thought you’d want the threat to your children contained.”

“...bring her in.” Leonard opens the door wider and Stuart hustles her in.

“Where’s Sheldon?”

“In his room, but if you go in there... he’s pretty pissed off.”

“Oh, is he still PMSing?” Penny snipes.

Leonard ignores her. “How did you even know about us?”

“You hear a lot of weird shit when you work retail. Sooner or later, you learn how to sort out the truth from the lies.”

(It still sounds wrong when he swears.)

“Oh,” Leonard says, still sounding less than convinced.

“I should apologize to Sheldon,” Penny says. “You know. For hitting him with the bat.”

“I suppose.”

Stuart eases up on her hair as they go down the hallway, which is good, because if they get out of this alive she’s going to need freedom of movement to smack him. Leonard, leading them, reminds her of nothing so much as a proud parent chivvying his friends around the viewing area at the maternity ward.

* * *

Sheldon is in bed. It must be Sheldon because it’s Sheldon’s bed, and nobody else is allowed in Sheldon’s room, let alone Sheldon’s bed.

(She is not going to think about how he got pregnant using that logic.)

The – yeah, okay – tentacles are flailing around. Sheldon’s face is beet red. Leonard immediately throws himself on the bed, pinning down a couple of Sheldon’s more unruly – limbs.

“Sheldon. Shelly. It’s okay,” he croons. “Please, you have to calm down. You don’t want to lose the babies.”

“Gee, Leonard,” Penny says as loudly as possible, “I didn’t think anyone was allowed on Sheldon’s bed.”

There’s a heartbeat when she thinks Leslie hasn’t heard her.

Then the window shatters inward, Leslie executes a neat dive roll across the floor, and comes up holding the _Ghostbusters_ gun thing. She aims and fires and before Penny can react there’s a weighted net bursting out over the bed, settling over Sheldon and Leonard’s squirming forms.

“Nice job, Barbie,” Leslie says. “You know, with the statement of the obvious. It’s not like I can see through windows or anything.”

“Can it, L,” Penny says, moving to grab the net. Leonard spits at her through it and the saliva hits her shoulder with a sizzle. The back of her head hurts like crazy; she’s really going to have to have a word with Stuart after this. Sheldon tries to smack her hands away with his tentacles, making an unearthly high-pitched whine.

“Watch out for their feet,” Stuart says.

“Yeah, because _that’s_ the problematic part,” Penny huffs.

“Move your hand for a sec.”

 _Zzzzt_.

Sheldon’s tentacles jerk spasmodically into stillness. Leonard spits at Stuart. Stuart tases him next, muttering something about excessive discount expectations.

Between the three of them they bundle Leonard and Sheldon onto the floor, securing the net.

“How the hell do we get them into the van?” Penny wipes sweat off her forehead.

“Down the fire escape.” Leslie produces a fine coil of rope from the back of her belt. It doesn’t look like it would support a toddler, let alone two full-grown men.

“And where do we go from there?”

“ _We_ go, Penny.” Stuart gives her a tired look. “You don’t. You go home, and pack a bag, and get out of Pasadena. Out of the state would be better. Don’t go back to Nebraska. If the others find out they'll follow you.”

“You’re not kicking me out of this now.” Penny folds her arms, glares at him, and then stomps on one of Sheldon’s tentacles as he tries to grab Stuart’s foot.

Surprisingly, it’s Leslie who speaks up. “She has a point, S. She’s seen a lot already.”

“I still–”

That’s when the apartment door slams open.


	3. Chapter 3

For the second time in as many hours, someone’s telling Penny to run.

To be specific:

“Get out of that fucking window before I push you, Barbie!”

Penny stops on the fire escape. “Are they even going to fit?”

“Just trust us,” Stuart says, and then he’s shoving Leonard headfirst out of the window, and Penny has to focus on catching him, jamming his glasses back onto his nose, and not _looking down_.

It’s just. She’s not acrophobic. She’s just pretty sure that in a building where the lift has been broken for however many years it’s been, the fire escape is probably not one of the super’s priorities. Stuff is making squealing rusty noises right under her feet. It’s unsettling, okay?

The thud and clatter of something inside Sheldon’s room distracts her from the crumbling architecture and she peeks through the window to see Leslie shouldering one of the bookshelves in front of the door. Not that that will help if whoever’s in the apartment has weird bodily accessories; Penny’s pretty sure that tentacles beat barricades.

“Penny,” Stuart says, voice strained, “can you focus?”

She nods, drags Leonard all the way onto the fire escape -- _creeeeak_ \-- and stands by to catch Sheldon. She still doesn’t think that Leslie’s skinny little coil of rope is going to get them down four floors, but Stuart’s hooking it efficiently onto the net, looping it around where the net closes to help keep it closed, and perhaps she shouldn’t be questioning the physics of, well, a physicist.

“Over the railing.”

“Jesus, Stuart, are you sure--”

“ _Yes_.” His face is whiter than white but he’s done this before, or at least stuff _like_ this before; she’s pretty sure nobody’s scientistnapped Sheldon and Leonard before.

Leslie screams, but it’s an anger noise, not a fear noise.

Penny bends and tugs and pulls and lifts, and Leonard teeters on the edge.

When he goes over, his weight pulls Sheldon with him.

“Is this how you’re meant to deal with pregnant people?” she says through the window.

Stuart starts paying out the rope; as it whips past her she realizes that it has some kind of metal core. “Let’s just say we’re playing this by ear.”

She shuts up and helps him ease their precarious bundle down and down and down.

“Barbie, get downstairs and make sure they land safely.” Leslie’s abandoned her position at the bedroom door. Sheldon’s comic book collection is never going to be the same. The door shudders regularly under repeated blows.

Penny goes, because she’s officially too freaked out to argue, because over those solid thuds she can hear Amy calling Sheldon’s name, Howard calling Leonard’s, and Bernadette calling hers.

 

She drops from the foot of the fire escape’s precarious last ladder, tucks and rolls automatically, and fetches up against one of Mrs. Vartabedian’s rose bushes. Her elderly neighbor probably uses actual blood and bone for fertilizer. The thought has her on her feet in a second and reaching up to guide the bulging net to the ground. Stuart’s already halfway down and hits the ground just in time to tase Sheldon as he stirs and reaches for Penny’s leg.

Leslie abseils down, gracefully kicking off each landing, her sleeves pulled over her hands to prevent rope burn. The fire escape creaks and moans and by the time that she lands it’s starting to pull away from the wall.

“You’re crazy, you’ll break your neck,” Stuart says.

“Better than them breaking it for me.” She bends and picks up Leonard’s feet. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They make it to the van without further incident. Leslie helps drag the boys in and then dashes for the driver’s seat.

“S, get up here.”

“I’m staying back here. Pe-- she might need my help if they try to get loose.”

“Can’t we _all_ sit up front?” Penny asks.

Stuart pulls the doors closed behind them as Leslie starts the engine. “Sure. And when Sheldon strangles our driver from behind and we careen out of control off the road and go up in a pillar of flame, you can hope that whatever government agents they send out to cover it up eventually tell your parents that you’re dead.”

“Oh,” Penny says. She has never heard her own voice so small.

The van lurches into motion, and Stuart flops onto a bench that runs along one wall, pulling her down beside him. “I’m sorry. I--” He lets out a defeated huff. “This isn’t something you should have to be mixed up in.”

“They’re my friends.” Penny looks down at the unmoving bodies at her feet. “They _are_ my friends, aren’t they?”

“Penny...”

“Leslie _slept_ with Leonard. And Howard. She’s -- they didn’t do anything to her.”

“Nice assumption, Barbie. How do you know we’re not taking you somewhere to make you the next brood mother?” Leslie calls back through the mesh between the van’s body and the cab.

“You wouldn’t bother to take me somewhere else when you could’ve impregnated me in my own apartment building full of these things,” Penny says.

Must be a weird night, if talking about Leslie Winkle impregnating her isn’t the bizarrest thing she’s said all night.

Stuart’s poking at her and she realizes he’s offering her a makeshift seat belt. “Better buckle in,” he says. “Leslie’s driving can get a little wild.”

“Only out of necessity.”

Penny buckles in. If she doesn’t, she just knows she’ll wind faceplanting into the opposite wall. As it’s bristling with electronics, tiny monitors, a keyboard, and half a dozen additional weapons, that is decidedly not a thing that she wants to do.

“Where are we going now?” she asks.

“There’s one more person in this area who we can go to, and he’s got enough pull to help cover this thing up. Assuming that your friends don’t figure out what’s going on and follow us.” Leslie sounds terse, but Penny can still hear the undercurrent of excitement. She can see the gleam of the same in Stuart’s eyes. Hell, if she had a mirror, she’d probably see it in her own. This is surreal and kind of disgusting and not at all what she’d been expecting at the start of the evening, but it’s so far from the boredom of waitressing or retail or even whatever Leslie does at Caltech that she can understand the rush.

They pass a sign for Arroyo Seco Parkway, and Penny opens her mouth.

“Yes, we’re going to LA,” Stuart says before she can ask.

Penny has a sneaking suspicion that she knows who’s in LA, but just then Sheldon tries to bite her foot, and the sudden need to kick one of her best friends in the head makes her forget to ask.

Stuart’s hand finds hers. When she looks at him he’s looking at the back of Leslie’s head. Penny links her fingers through his. She can’t quite tell which of them is shaking more. 


	4. Chapter 4

She really should have seen this coming.

“Did you _deliberately_ not call ahead to let me know you were coming just to piss me off?” Wil hitches his bathrobe all the way closed, tightens his belt, and smiles at Penny. “Hey. Sorry you got caught up in all this.”

“I’m more sorry nobody bothered to tell me sooner.”

“We didn’t call ahead because your number’s unlisted, stupid,” Leslie says. “It’s not like there’s a secret phone directory for ‘people who don’t have tentacles’.”

“Just bring the van in off the street. We’ll talk once things are a little more secure.” Wil’s got his phone in his hand and it looks like he’s on Twitter and if he’s livetweeting this Penny is going to add him to the list of people she wants to punch. But then as Leslie scrambles back into the driver’s seat, Wil’s lips draw together thin and pale.

“What’s wrong?”

“People are starting to tweet about seeing strange stuff off the coast near San Francisco.”

“Like?”

“They say it’s giant squid, but...” He puts his hand on her shoulder. “You’ve seen enough to know that it’s probably not, okay?”

Penny wishes really hard that she’d just gone and got the fucking soy sauce before the argument had escalated as far as it had. Sure, blissful ignorance might not have lasted all that long, especially after Sheldon gave birth to -- well, whatever -- but it would have been nice.

Stuart rounds the corner of the house. “Is the garage going to be secure enough to keep them if they find a way out of the van?”

“No, no, we’ll take them downstairs.”

 

Of _course_ Wil has one of those SoCal rarities: a basement. To her disappointment it’s not filled with whips and chains or anything interesting. There are a couple of bookshelves, a very well locked cabinet, and spider-fine cracks in the walls that have been plastered and replastered.

“How do you think Amy and the others knew they were in trouble?” Penny asks as Wil unlocks the cabinet and starts digging through the combination hospital dispensary and weapon repository therein. “Are they psychic or something?”

“We don’t know that they’re _not_ ,” Stuart says cautiously.

“Although my personal bet goes toward, you know, text messaging,” Leslie says. She does manage to say it without a total _you idiots_ tone, at least.

“What about the thing in the sea near San Francisco? Was that going to rise anyway or was it responding to this?”

“That, we really don’t know,” Wil says, coming out at last with a syringe and a bottle. “Any of you know how much either of them weigh?”

Penny gives him an estimate and Wil injects both Sheldon and Leonard with whatever is in the bottle, which at last stops them flailing around so much.

“So that’s containment and capture, covered, if half-assed,” Leslie says. “Now what the fuck do we do?”

“Before we do anything else, we need to establish that you weren’t followed and that this sighting in San Francisco isn’t just a hoax.”

“It’s probably too early for Snopes.” Stuart runs his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking up every which way.

“Social media is our friend.” Wil turns to a laptop glowing quietly in a corner. “I know a lot of it ends up being bull, but between Instagram and any regular news channels that have picked up on it, I -- oh.”

Stuart pushes in beside him and says, “Oh, that’s really not meant to be happening.”

Penny and Leslie exchange a look that, for once, is on the same level, and relates to a particular gender and their inability to use their goddamn words.

“He’s not meant to be anywhere near the US.” Stuart’s talking too fast. “R’yleh’s been established as being in the South Pacific, that’s how Lovecraft wrote it, this is just wrong.”

“I seriously doubt that these fuck-ups care about adhering to canon,” Leslie says, sticking her head between the two of them. And then even she’s silenced by whatever they’re looking at.

Penny doesn’t want to know. Really, she doesn’t. It seems like _not_ knowing is, in fact, in her best interests at this stage. But she’s damned if she’s going to be ignorant about whatever it is that’s going on, and so she moves over, feeling like all her limbs are weighted down by sandbags, and looks.

At first glance, sure, maybe she’d describe it as a giant squid. But then she realizes that the squid part is really only the thing’s face. Which is worrying, to say the least, because, well. “Giant” doesn’t quite cover it.

“Even _Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni_ isn’t that big and besides, that’s an _Antarctic_ species, not -- S, what were you saying about the South Pacific? -- maybe tectonic drift could account for -- but no, the plates can’t have moved that far if the last sighting was--”

Penny doesn’t think about what she does to shut Leslie up; she just slides her hand into Leslie’s mop of wild curls, pulls Leslie to her, and presses her closed lips to Leslie’s still-open ones. Leslie doesn’t react for three seconds, and then her tongue is pressed against Penny’s lower lip, possibly by accident, and what eventually separates them is Wil making a noise that can best be phonetically rendered as, “Glurk.”

“Thanks, Barbie,” Leslie says, not quite sarcastically. Her palm is warm against the side of Penny’s face. Penny doesn’t remember her putting it there.

Penny shrugs. “I figured it was nicer than slapping you. You were kinda hysterical.”

“Glurk,” goes Wil again.

“No comment, S?” Leslie asks.

Stuart gives them a wry smile. “I went to art college. Call me when you start doing body shots and maybe I’ll be shocked, depending on the location.”

Penny goes back to looking at the computer. If the giant squid thing is the thing’s head or face or whatever, and that bit’s -- she thinks -- about two hundred feet from the top to the tip of the longest tentacles, then the body has to be...

“Is there any way of telling just how big this thing is?”

Wil unglurks his brain and points to the bottom of the screen. “See that thing that might be its foot?”

“Yeah.”

“See that pointy building that’s by its probably-ankle?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s the Transamerica Pyramid.”

“Well, shit.”

“It doesn’t matter how big it is,” Stuart interjects, “but if we don’t get moving soon, the potential for tidal waves alone is huge, and we still don’t know if the van was followed. Plus...” He looks actually pained. “I think we have to assume that that thing out there has risen in response to the threat to the next generation of eldritches.” He nods at Sheldon and Leonard. “So if we take them with us...”

“If we take them with us, we get to worry about grandpa out there following us,” Leslie says.

“Are you saying we have to leave them here?” Penny looks down at them. Aside from the net, the fact that Sheldon still has tentacles poking out of his shirt, and that Leonard’s open mouth reveals rather more rows of teeth than she remembers him having, they look like they could just be sleeping.

“We don’t _have_ to, but given the choice between leaving them for grandpa to find and take home, or taking them and getting chased across the country by that fucked-up giant squid hybrid...” Leslie spreads her hands wide. “Penny, if leaving them here for him to find is the way to save the rest of the country, then we have to.”

Penny knows she’s serious; Leslie didn’t call her “Barbie” this time.

“Do we just drive away and leave them here? What if they wake up and escape?”

“The only way they’ll get out of this basement is if grandpa comes and gets them,” Wil says. “I know it looks like shit but the walls are reinforced steel.” He sighs. “I _liked_ this house.”

“I hope you have good insurance,” Leslie says.

“We need to move _right now_ ,” Stuart says suddenly. He’s still watching the computer screen. The image has cut from the live footage to a map of the state with a red dot marked on it. There are lines overlaid on it; a handful of blue, and one long red one. “I hate to say 'I told you so', but the tidal waves...” He taps the blue lines. “Also, I don’t know what the red line is but I _think_ it’s Cthulhu’s projected path. He’s on the move, and he’s headed this way.”

“I’m going to stick with saying ‘grandpa’,” Leslie says.

“Why? Cthulhu’s not like Voldemort. The one you want to watch out for there is Hastur.”

“Yeah, but it’s fucking hard to pronounce.”

“Nicknames aside,” Wil says, “Stuie’s right. We need to get going.”

“Are we taking the van?” Penny asks warily, thinking of Leslie’s driving.

“I can do better than that.”

 

Of _course_ Wil fucking Wheaton has a private fucking aeroplane and his solo fucking licence and, just, Penny would be ridiculously annoyed about the fact except that he takes two minutes before they take off (from a private airfield, thank God, because navigating LAX in the current panicked climate would be literally impossible) to show her where the coffee maker is. As soon as they’re in the air and leveled off she’s out of her seat and making the blackest, sweetest brew she can.

“Does he know where we’re going?” she asks, nodding toward the front of the tiny plane as she settles back into her seat.

Leslie, facing her across the aisle, rolls her eyes in lieu of shrugging. (Stuart’s head is on her shoulder, his eyes closed; he looks like he’s just plain run out of adrenaline.) “Nevada, I assume, if he can get in touch with our contact there. Maybe not. The radio there does strange things sometimes.”

“If not Nevada?”

“Texas.”

“What’s in Texas?”

“More of our people.” She gives Penny a funny slanted smile. “You might know them.”

“Fuck,” Penny says. “Next time I find out my friends are fucked-up alien monsters and that the resistance holding out against the end of the world by giant squid is secretly people I’ve known for years, I’m going to demand a list of names before I even leave the apartment.”

Leslie just leans her head against Stuart’s and grins.


	5. Chapter 5

“We have bad news,” Wil says some time later, voice crackling through the cabin speakers.

Penny looks around for a second, finds a microphone not far from her seat, and flips the switch from LISTEN to TALK-LISTEN. “What kind of bad news?”

“It looks like Nevada’s been cancelled. Can you see anything out of the port windows?”

Penny twists around and presses her face to the window. She can see the pale smudge of the plane’s wing, but beyond that, only darkness. “No.”

“Me either. According to my instruments, we should be over Vegas right now.”

Leslie blinks her way up out of sleep. “What _now_?”

“The world’s ending some more.”

“Batman, you jerk,” Stuart mumbles, lifting his head off Leslie’s shoulder. “What?”

“Wil says Nevada has disappeared.”

“Motherfucker,” Leslie says succinctly. “Now what?”

“We carry on to Texas and hope that’s still there because otherwise we might as well fly into the Bermuda Triangle. We don’t have enough fuel to go much further.” Wil still sounds infuriatingly cheerful. “Leslie, have you got your phone?”

“Of course.”

“Start trying as many people as you know. You might as well try whoever’s in Nevada, just in case it’s something between us and the ground, although I wouldn’t rate your chances of getting a signal in that case.”

“I thought you weren’t meant to use cell phones on planes.” Penny frowns.

“I love how _that’s_ your big worry considering we’re missing a state and there’s mutant calamari attacking the world,” Leslie says, and starts dialing.

Penny looks at Stuart. Stuart shrugs. “I just assume that she knows what she’s doing. it’s usually safer that way.”

“I guess if you trust her driving you’ll trust anything she does,” Penny says.

“I resent that remark,” Leslie says. Then, “Hey, C. You can’t talk? At all? You sure _sound_ like you’re talking to me.”

“Feel free to make out with her again if she starts alienating our contacts with her sarcasm,” Wil contributes. Penny gives the finger to the cockpit and racks the mic harder than strictly necessary.

Stuart unbuckles his seatbelt and makes his way gingerly over to sit beside her. The seats are way more comfortable than regular airline seats; there are four on each side facing each other across the aisle. Leslie promptly relocates down the far end, not out of rudeness, but because she’s already got her finger in her ear to help her hear whoever she’s talking to.

“How’re you holding up?” Stuart asks.

“I’ve been better,” Penny admits. “Is this really the end of the world?”

Stuart takes her hand, his warm fingers reassuring. “It might not be. We’re working strictly on guesses based on stories that people thought were fictional for a long time, though, so exactly how to stop this thing now it’s started is anyone’s guess.”

Penny mulls this over for a few minutes before she asks, “Is this my fault?”

“No. _No_. If you’re going to blame yourself, you might as well blame me and Leslie for not telling you that your apartment building was full of eldritches. Or blame Wil for not evacuating us all to his big reinforced celebrity house.”

“I can still he-ear you,” Wil sing-songs.

Stuart reaches up and turns the mic back to LISTEN. “So don’t start blaming anyone, okay? This situation is honestly too fucked-up to start figuring out whose fault it is.” His eyes are wide and sincere.

Penny can’t keep from smiling. “It’s so weird hearing you swear.”

“You should have heard him in Altadena,” Leslie calls from down the back. “I thought he was going to turn the air blue.”

“Speaking of the air color, doesn’t it look _too_ dark out there?” Stuart’s twisted around in his seat, peering out of the window.

“No lights from Vegas...” Penny’s not sure.

“There should be moonlight, starlight... something. I don’t know.”

“What if it’s not just Vegas that’s gone?”

“Texas is still okay,” Leslie says, re-relocating to Penny’s other side. “I got through to them all right, and Wil can land this puppy anywhere. We still have at least an hour and a half to go, though.” She nods toward a monitor near the door through to the cockpit; a map of the southwestern states with a blinking green dot slowly trekking across the screen. “Assuming that map’s accurate, that is.”

“Since we’re basing our chances of not dying on this flight, I’m going to assume that it is,” Stuart says, settling down in his seat. He’s asleep again about three minutes later, his head dropping onto Penny’s shoulder this time. He’s still holding her hand.

“How can you two sleep through this?” Penny asks.

“Practice. Plus lil’ Possum can sleep anywhere. Sometimes with his eyes open. Between living out of the back of his store and the time he’s spent in the van, he’s learned to make the most of any nap opportunity.” Leslie cozies up to her on the other side, her curly hair brushing against Penny’s cheek.

“How am I supposed to sleep with both of you all over me?” Penny says. It’s not quite a complaint.

“I’m going to take that the most innocent way possible, Barbie, and tell you you’ll figure it out.” Leslie reaches up and touches Penny’s cheek and, when Penny turns her head, Leslie’s lips find hers. They are soft but aggressive and for a second Penny’s too surprised to reciprocate. But then she gives as good as she gets.

“What was that for?” she asks when her tongue isn’t otherwise engaged.

“Owed you one,” Leslie says. Then she snuggles her head down on Penny’s shoulder, one hand dropping to rest on Penny’s thigh, and is asleep -- or apparently so -- within seconds.

Truth be told, it’s not the weirdest situation Penny’s been in. Oh, the pregnant Sheldon part is, and the weird-ass alien thing rising out of the sea _totally_ is, but when it comes to what she’s going to term “escalated makeouts”, this is _her_ wheelhouse. She’s tripped up a little by the fact that, out of these three people she’s surviving the end of the world with, _Leslie Winkle_ is the one who’s making the move on her, but all things considered it’s not the biggest surprise she’s had tonight.

Penny puts her free hand over Leslie’s, tucking her fingers around the other woman’s. Her head lolls back against the headrest. Soon, despite the thoughts racing in her head, she too is asleep, lulled by the low drone of the engines and the soft, regular breathing of the warm bodies either side of her.

 

The bump of the landing wakes all three of them.

“Sorry,” Wil says over the speaker. “This isn’t exactly a regular airfield.”

“That tells me we should be ready for anything,” Leslie says, going from zero to unbuckled and reaching for her gun in five seconds. “Barbie, you take a handgun and your bat. I saw the wounds you left on the two in Pasadena. Nice work.”

Stuart just gets up, pours half a cup of coffee, dumps in about six packets of sugar and two shots of creamer, and drinks it in one go.

“Isn’t that cold?” Penny asks, disgusted and fascinated.

“Yeah.” Stuart drops the cup in the trash. “But now I’m awake.”

Penny eyes the coffee herself, but they don’t have time to make it fresh and she is not _that_ desperate. Instead she arms herself as requested. Leslie is already opening the door, and this time she’s not carrying something that only fires a net.

“Welcome to Texas, y’all,” Wil says, meeting them on the ground.

“Where the hell are we?” Penny asks.

“Don’t know. Some park. It didn’t have a name on the map. But it was the closest clear space to our destination.”

“Which is?”

“Fuddruckers.”

“I’m sorry, what? We flew over like three, four states, just so you could get a _burger_?”

“Not exactly.” And Wil refuses to elaborate, leading them along a mostly deserted street. The few people that they see are walking quickly, heads down, on their way to somewhere, anywhere else. The cross-streets all have numbers instead of names. Penny can smell the salt tang of the sea on the air.

“What did C say about Nevada, Leslie?” Stuart asks.

“Oh, from his point of view it’s all normal. There’s some kind of glowing cloud over the town he’s in, but apparently that’s happened before, and their streetlights all went out for an hour or so, but he says it’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Could he see the sky?”

“Yeah. He said it was mostly void, partly stars or something. Nothing about anything that might explain why we couldn’t see anything down there.”

Wil makes a frustrated noise, interrupting the two of them. “Do we not have _anyone_ in Vegas itself?”

“No, but I called the front desk at Caesars Palace and got _nada_ ,” Leslie says. “Same with the Grand, the Luxor...”

Stuart gets his own phone out, squinting at the screen.

“Who’re you calling?” Penny asks.

“My parents.” He offers her a bleak smile. “They’re in Santa Monica though, so I’m not...” He trails off, listening to the ringing and ringing on the other end of the line.

“What about your family, Leslie?” Penny’s having trouble looking at Stuart now.

“Oh, they’ll be fine, they’re in Saskatchewan somewhere. Skiing, I think.” She eyes Penny. “Yours?”

“Nebraska. It’ll take a pretty big wave to get that far in.”

Stuart’s trying a different number now. Leslie moves over to him, slipping her hand into his free hand. Apparently this is what one does at the end of the world: hold hands a lot, but not so tightly that one can’t reach for one’s weapons.

“It could be an Area 51 thing,” Wil says, apparently ignorant as to the change in conversational topic. “Nevada, I mean. They’ve probably got all kinds of weird technology hidden out there.”

“You’ve been watching too much _X-Files_ ,” Penny tells him.

“I never really got into it, actually. I was sort of avoiding sci-fi stuff at that point... you know, the whole _Trek_ thing.” He then promptly devalues his own statement by adding, “Hey, L, do we have anyone in Roswell?”

“This isn’t that sort of alien, Dubya.”

“We don’t know that it isn’t _all_ the aliens.”

Stuart snaps his head around, glaring at the three of them. “Can you guys just shut up? _Please_? I’m on the phone here.” He resumes speaking into the phone in a low voice. Penny dutifully shuts up as Wil leads them around a corner and the neon sign announcing their destination comes into view, comforting in its normalcy.

Penny realizes why they’re here just before Wil moves to open the door, and grabs his wrist. “Wait. We’re here to see Sheldon’s sister, aren’t we?”

“I hope so, otherwise this has been a waste of fuel.”

“But if she’s related to him... isn’t she one of them?”

“She’s not one of them, Barbie,” Leslie says. “Sheldon was only one of them by virtue of becoming Leonard’s breeding partner. Howard’s the one who had it in the family. Amy and Bernadette, I don’t know. And Raj -- we never knew if he was one of them or not. I’m sorry we didn’t have time to hang around Pasadena and find out, but chances are that, given his emotional proximity to Howard, he probably wasn’t normal any more.”

“You slept with Howard,” Penny points out. “And Leonard.”

“Look, if you want to conduct a cavity search to make sure I don’t have any cavities where they shouldn’t be, can we at least do it off the street? It’s hard to be comfortable with hanging out this close to the docks when there are octo-fuckups coming out of the sea.”

“Amen,” says Stuart, stepping past Wil to push the door open.

Not all of the lights are on in the restaurant, but it feels safer than outdoors. Penny can hear something frying on the grill, probably bacon judging by the smell, and there are voices murmuring down near the kitchen area.

“Missy?” she calls out.

Everything goes silent, apart from the sizzling bacon.

“What’s the password?” a familiar-ish voice calls back.

Penny looks blankly at the others.

Stuart smiles, sort of. “We were wondering whether we could talk to you about _Je_ sus?”

“ _Stuart_?” Missy pokes her head out from the kitchen. “Oh! Penny! You made it!”

“Now, I’m not saying God will judge you for your blasphemy,” Mary says from behind her, “but I wish you’d pick a different password.”

Missy blithely ignores her, waving for the four of them to come in. “We were just making dinner. Want something?”

Penny does a double-take, realizing that they are now in fact in a different time zone and that it is in fact dinner time, for a given value of dinner time, and possibly a given value of dinner. But then Missy’s hugging her and she gives up on thinking about food and just hugs her back.

“Penny. I was hopin’ you’d get out all right,” Mary says. There’s a deep sadness in her eyes. Penny pulls her close and holds her tight and doesn’t say anything, not sorry, not anything about her losing her son. She just. She can’t. What words are there at a time like this?

They gather in the kitchen. There’s bacon and eggs and waffles and a whole mess of other things that look like this is breakfast, not dinner. And another woman. A woman who Penny’s never met, but who she knows on sight.

“Meemaw?”

Meemaw’s smile is kind but sharp. “Penny. My Moonpie told me a lot about you before he passed.”

“But he--” Mary kicks her ankle and Penny switches smoothly to, “--never told me all I wanted to know about you. Like your actual name? I mean, you can’t just be Meemaw.”

“Mercy,” Meemaw says. “Mercy Cooper. God willing we all see mercy and respite from this whole mess. Now y’all sit down and get some food into you. Whatever lies ahead of us, we’ll need full bellies to fight it off.”

Stuart’s hanging back near the doorway, while the other two are moving in to gather around the long bench in the middle of the kitchen. Penny sidles back around to him, watching with some amusement as Wil kisses Mary’s hand and then Meemaw’s.

“Did you speak to anyone?” she asks softly.

“My sister in New York. They’ve had severe weather warnings issued, but nothing about anything rising from the sea. She said she’d keep trying Mom and Dad and call me back  if she got anywhere so I didn’t waste my cell battery.” He gives her a wan smile. “Or run out of call minutes.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“I’m not sure if any of us are. But you never know; maybe the world’s only ending a little bit.”

Penny impulsively kisses his cheek. “At least we’re all together. Go eat something.”

“Where are you going?”

Penny shoulders her bat. “To keep watch.”

 

She sits in a booth near the front door, looking out into the night. Here, the smell of food is muted by the smell of the sea. She can hear the others talking -- Wil saying something about picking up more fuel for the plane, Missy asking him where in hell exactly he plans to fly, Mary and Meemaw both telling her off for cussing.

Penny looks at her phone, scrolls through the contacts list, up and down and back again and finally settling on _Raj K_ and pressing Send.

It goes to his voicemail. She’s not entirely surprised. She’s not sure if California even exists any more. There’s probably a radio in the kitchen or back room, but whether the news is likely to be accurate is another story.

She looks at Amy and Bernadette’s names for a long minute before putting her phone back in her pocket. She suddenly feels cold, but doubts that the weather’s to blame. She pulls the jacket tighter around herself, but makes sure she can still grab her gun.

“Honey, you should eat something,” Missy says, setting a plate down beside her.

“Thanks. Coffee?”

“Comin’ right up. I won’t gripe if you don’t tip me.” That’s enough to draw a giggle out of Penny as Missy sashays back toward the kitchen.

The plate has syrupy waffles and a mountain of bacon and scrambled eggs, and Penny realizes that she didn’t ever actually eat dinner back home and digs in with a will.

“We called the airport,” Missy says when she comes back with Penny’s coffee. “There’s nobody there.”

“Did they all take the night off?”

“I hope so, because either that or it’s flooded or something, and if it is, we’re next.”

Penny gulps her coffee. “Then why are we sitting around here eating?”

“‘Cause Meemaw’s right. We need full bellies for this.” Missy refills Penny’s mug. “Eat your waffles at least; they’re homemade.”

“Do we have a plan other than ‘run away’?”

“Well, sure. Wil’s takin’ the plane over to Scholes anyway to try for fuel. Leslie’s goin’ with him. I have the car for the rest of us, so we’ll go meet them there.”

“And then?”

“Leslie says that regular giant squid aren’t usually found in tropical areas or polar ones. Stuart says this ain’t a regular giant squid, but I reckon our chances are better if we try one of those, and nobody likes the idea of going to the North Pole, so...” Missy shrugs. “Wil thinks we just keep going until we find somewhere that’s actually got a flight control tower workin’ worth a damn.”

“I heard that, Melissa Rose!” Mary hollers from the kitchen.

“Sorry, Mom!”

“Well, fleeing from giant squid things isn’t high on my list of road trip ideas, but I guess we don’t have much choice, do we?” Penny looks down at her plate and realizes she’s eaten everything. Huh. “Do we have to leave for the airport right away?”

“You were the one who wanted to hurry.”

“Yeah, but if we’re going overseas, I want at least one change of underwear.”

Missy grins. “Didn’t bring your bug-out bag, huh?”

Penny pats her bat. “This is it.”

“I’m sure we can figure something out for you. Finish your coffee. We’ve got a trip to pack for.”

 


	6. Chapter 6

Wil and Leslie leave a few minutes later. Penny hears the drone of the light plane overhead and realizes it’s the first outside sound she’s heard in a while. She carries her plate back to the kitchen and stacks it into the dishwasher on autopilot. Missy is packing a cooler with stuff from the walk-in freezer; Mary is filling cloth shopping bags in the back room with stuff that’s likely to last a while. Penny has evidently missed more of a conversation than she thought. She doesn’t bother to ask what they’re doing, just goes to help Stuart ferry the bags out to the trunk of Missy’s car out in the employee parking lot. It’s raining, only lightly, but her wet hair is sticking to her face before long. The leather jacket keeps her warm and dry, though. The rain intensifies the smell of the sea.

“You’re dealing with this all really well,” Stuart comments as they cart the cooler out between them.

“What choice do I have? Either I deal or I go crazy.” Penny looks at him, a slight figure, his curls smoothed down by the rain. “I guess it helps that you’re here. I mean, because you’re not one of them.”

“An eldritch?”

“A scientist,” Penny says. “You’re _normal_. I’ve got more in common with you than with Leslie. If you can cope with this, then so can I.”

Stuart hefts his end of the cooler. “You seem to have _something_ in common with Leslie.” He gives her a sidelong smile.

Penny drags a shopping bag aside to make room for the cooler. “Yeah, well, strange bedfellows, you know.”

“Just don’t join the mile high club in Wil’s plane. I’m not sure _he_ has yet and he’d be jealous.”

Penny considers it briefly, then shakes her head. “Not with the Coopers there, at least.”

“Oh, so _I’d_ have to watch?”

“Nah. You can go up front with Wil and play in the cockpit.”

Their laughter is a little strained, but more real than it perhaps has a right to be.

* * *

Car loaded, the five of them (Missy driving, Mercy riding shotgun -- literally, rifle across her knees, which is possibly the coolest thing Penny’s ever seen from someone who must be pushing eighty) head through the empty streets toward Scholes International Airport.

There’s water across the road in a few places.

“Climate change predictions never took Cthulhu rising from the sea into account,” Stuart says.

“Maybe we should be building an ark,” Penny says, and Mary elbows her.

The thought occurs that with the food supplies, maybe they _are_ building an ark.

Stuart’s phone peeps a tinny tune and he answers it. “Annie. Any news?”

By the time the call is done, he’s decidedly pale. Mary puts her arm around his hunched shoulders. He looks like he’s trying to withdraw into himself.

“Annie says that a pretty big wave hit California, Oregon, and some of Mexico. The reporters aren’t going anywhere near the West Coast except in helicopters, and a couple of them got snatched right out of the sky.” He swallows hard and Penny silently passes him a water bottle. “They’re not calling Cthulhu by his name on the reports. It’s probably safer. Some of the Great Old Ones... if you name them, like Hastur, if you say their name the right number of times, it can summon them.”

“Like Bloody Mary?” Penny asks.

“Yeah. Only bigger. A _lot_ bigger.”

“Where are we even going from here?”

“Wherever we can,” Stuart says, and Penny falls silent, because it seems that’s all there is to say right now.

* * *

They transfer the food and the few other supplies Missy has pulled together into the back of the plane. Stuart does end up going up front with Wil, just to make a little more space in the passenger area, although Penny suspects that the prospect of spending hours in the air with three generations of Cooper women might have more than a little to do with it.

Leslie is uncharacteristically quiet as they settle into their seats and buckle in, and Penny manages to hold out until after takeoff to ask her what’s up.

“We’re limited as to how far we can go in this plane because of how much fuel we’ll burn. It’s going to make international flight hard. Wil says we might have to go to South America first and see what the situation’s like there before we consider going any further.”

“But isn’t that even closer to the part of the Pacific where Stuart thought this thing was coming from?”

“I somehow don’t think that grandpa out there’s all that worried about where people _think_ he’s from.” Leslie’s been speaking in a low voice; she lowers it even further when she adds, “I think he’s just out to make sure the kids are alright, you know?”

“Yeah, I get it.”

Wil’s voice comes over the intercom. “Slight change of plans, everyone -- we’re going to check out the East Coast first before we head south.”

Leslie grabs the microphone. “Won’t that burn more fuel?”

“Yes, but I think we need to see some things for ourselves. Stuie’s sister is in New York, too.”

“Oh, and are we going via Nebraska to pick up Barbie’s family as well? In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting pretty crowded back here.”

Penny really wants to smack her for that comment, but right then is when her phone starts ringing. She digs it out of her pocket with a shaky hand and checks the caller display.

Raj. _Raj_.

“ _Answer_ it,” Leslie says, breath puffing hot against Penny’s ear.

“What if he’s...”

“Then at least we’ll know.”

Leslie’s hand on her knee is steadying. Penny still takes a moment before answering the phone with a simple, “Hello?”

Raj’s voice bursts into her ear, blessedly normal. “Penny! Oh my God, you’re alive! Where _are_ you?”

“Um. Texas?”

“What are you doing in Texas? Did Sheldon run away again?”

 _Yes. Right out of normality._ “No. Well... no. It’s a long story. Where are _you_?”

“New York,” Raj says, and it’s like a puzzle piece falling into place, or a second magnet added to the one that is Stuart’s sister, drawing them irresistibly east. “I’ve been doing guest lectures at Cornell for a few days now.” He sounds hurt. “Didn’t you notice I was gone?”

“Well, yeah, but I assumed you were working late, and I’ve had a rough week at work, and now most of the world seems to have been canceled.”

“That’s fair enough.”

“So _where_ in New York are you?” She adds to Leslie, “Ask Stuart where his sister lives.”

“Ithaca,” Raj says, and, “Staten Island,” Stuart says over the intercom.

“Can she get off the island and at least try to head upstate? Raj, what’s going on there, you’re not dealing with anything coming across the land, are you?”

“She’s cut off,” Stuart says. Penny can imagine the bleak look on his face. “She said there’s a traffic jam on every bridge, the water’s rising, and she was going to go sit on the roof with a bottle of wine.”

“My kind of woman,” Penny says. “Okay, so we go get her first, then pick Raj up, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”

“How are you going to pick me up?” Raj asks, hopeful. “Won’t it take you forever to get here?”

“We’ve got special transport.” Penny looks around the passenger area, wonders how crowded it will feel with two more people (and how the fuel needs will change, and how far they’ll get, and things she thinks it is unfair that she has to worry about, that Wil should be the one to worry about), and then explains what’s going on.

Minus the part about Sheldon being pregnant and Leonard being the father, that is. She opts to lie through her teeth about that when Raj asks again where they are, saying something about working late (why not, she’s on a roll with that), and Raj apparently buys it.

“He could be another eldritch, you know,” Stuart says when she’s off the phone. “We never really established whether he was or not.”

“Then you and Wil can pat him down for tentacles when we get to Ithaca,” Penny says sweetly, and gets up to make her wobbly way down to the minuscule bathroom at the tail of the plane. She doesn’t need to _go_ – the Fuddrucker’s bathroom was bigger, if not cleaner – but she hopes that the look she gives Leslie on the way is sufficiently hint-laden.

* * *

“If you called me in here to discuss the latest episode of _Survivor_ , you have a) the wrong person, and b) bad timing.”

Penny hitches her ass up onto the edge of the sink and reels Leslie in by the front of her jacket. “Nope. Stuart just said to me earlier that we shouldn’t join the mile high club in Wil’s plane before he has the chance to.”

“Before who does, Dub-Dub or Possum?” Leslie snakes her arms around Penny’s waist.

“Wil. Or, you know, both of them. Maybe there’s a reason they call it a _cock_ pit.”

“I deeply admire your ability to be crass in the face of the end of the world, Barbie,” Leslie says gravely, right before closing the little distance between them.

There is only so much one -- or rather, two -- can do in an airplane bathroom, but it’s way easier when it involves two Slot Bs instead of a Tab A and a Slot B, because they don’t need to be nearly as specific with what goes where. The only rule, really, is keeping their voices down; the thought of being confronted with three generations of disapproval when they get back out there is not one that either woman relishes.

“Wish we had more time,” Penny says breathlessly.

Leslie, between her thighs, nods; the jolt of the plane means she nearly headbutts Penny somewhere sensitive. “Once we’re settled in Brazil or wherever, we can laze on the beach and fan each other with palm leaves.”

“Really?”

“Of course fucking not,” Leslie snaps. “The world’s ending.” And then she goes back to work on Penny, who very quickly decides that she doesn’t mind that Leslie can get really snappy. Or, for that matter, that the world’s ending. She has more important things to – fucking _hell_ Leslie’s tongue is not at all sharp in _this_ context – worry about.

* * *

They saunter out maybe twenty minutes later, Penny carrying an armload of pre-cut, wrapped sandwiches from the mini-fridge opposite the bathroom door, like maybe it will be a plausible excuse. Anticlimactically, Missy and Mercy are both asleep; Mary is immersed in her Bible.

“‘In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.’ Isaiah. Chapter twenty-seven, verse one.” She looks up at Penny. Unlike Sheldon, her eyes are hazel; they have the same determined look that Penny’s seen a million times before, though. “This is not the end. _This is not the end_.”

Leslie drops into the seat across from her and leans over the narrow aisle. “Of course not, Mrs. Cooper,” she says, and Penny misses the rest as she goes up front, knocking on the cockpit door.

“New Orleans is flooded again,” Wil says as Stuart lets her in.

“Is there anywhere that isn’t?”

“Hopefully the further inland we turn, the more dry land we’ll see.” Stuart doesn’t look especially hopeful. Penny squeezes into his seat with him. “Most of the really big Mythos deities were water-based, but I think Shub-Niggurath was earth-based and _she_ was the one with the Thousand Young, so that could get really bad if she turns up, and Nyarlathotep can appear as a fucking storm cloud if he wants to, and Hastur--”

But Penny doesn’t find out what Stuart has to say about Hastur, because something smashes against the plane, something big and black and looming, and the console lights abruptly get closer, and then pain, and then darkness.


	7. Chapter 7

Fireflies dance in the darkness behind Penny’s eyelids. Her head is filled with a dull roaring; it takes her a minute to process it as the sound of the plane’s engine because it’s choppy and raw and wrong, somehow. Her forehead hurts. Her neck hurts. Her nose _really_ hurts and she’s afraid it might be broken. She cracks one eye open and doesn’t recoil from the glaring lights because there are not glaring lights; the passenger area is lit instead by soft amber bulbs that she instantly realizes signify a state of emergency. She lets her eye close again. Too much effort.

“Penny.” Leslie’s fingers rest against the side of her neck. “Can you hear me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Stay still, I’ll get you some water.” Penny can hear the concern in Leslie’s voice but it’s even more apparent for another reason: Leslie didn’t call her ‘Barbie’.

“Oh, thank Christ.” Stuart’s voice.

“Language.” Mary’s, reproving.

“Sorry. But she’s awake.”

“Where are we? Is the plane broken?”

“No idea, and no.” Leslie again, settling on the floor, helping Penny sit upright to lean against her and drink. Penny feels like she’s being bottle-fed, and opens her eyes to take the water and regain a modicum of control. There’s a first-aid kit cracked open beside her, the Band-Aid box torn open, and she can feel the tug of sticky bandage on her forehead. “At least, it’s not broken badly enough to stop flying.”

“What happened?”

There is a definitely fraught silence. Stuart’s looking at his hands, which are folded on his knees. With the Cooper women still sitting up in their seats, harnessed in safely, it almost feels like they’re sitting in judgment.

“I think it was my fault,” Stuart says. “I... you know the names I said we shouldn’t say? I may have said one of them one too many times.”

Memory comes back to Penny in a rush.

“And then that big black bat-thing hit the plane!”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“What happened after that?”

“We almost crashed, Wil played hide and seek with one of the Great Old Ones, and now we may or may not be back en route to New York because half of his instruments are fucked,” Leslie says. Mary doesn’t call her out on her language.

“But our engines are still good? And fuel?”

“Well, yeah, as long as we’re going toward somewhere with an airfield,” Stuart says. “We might only be flying half blind, but that’s enough to end up going around in circles.”

“Spare us the philosophy, Possum,” says Leslie, easing Penny back to the floor where, she discovers, there’s a lifejacket to act as a pillow and a blanket to act as a, well, blanket. What happens if Wil decides to loop the loop she doesn’t know. “I’m going up front to see if I can help navigate.”

“We really need Raj now.” Penny feels like she’s slipping back into sleep. Her mouth isn’t saying the words as fast as her brain is thinking them.

“How come?” Stuart repositions himself cross-legged beside her.

“Astrophysics,” Penny mumbles. “Astronavigation... he could look at the stars and tell us where to go.”

Mary starts singing, “The stars at night, are big and bright...”

“Deep in the heart of wherever the hell we are,” Leslie says. “Did I ever mention I was a Girl Scout? Finding our way by the stars was one of the first things we learned.” She dashes into the cockpit.

“I would never have believed she was a Girl Scout.” Stuart strokes Penny’s hair back from her face. “You want some ice for your nose?”

“Do you think it’s broken?”

“I think you’re talking way too intelligibly for it to be broken.” Stuart pulls a small plastic-wrapped packet out of the first aid kit and twists it between his hands. He hands it to Penny to apply and she’s rewarded with a blissful burst of coolness that soothes away the agony flowering in the center of her face.

“We should be okay now, right?”

“I guess. I feel like this is my fault.”

Penny clamps the cold pack against her nose with one hand and finds his hand with the other. Sheldon never listed excessive touchy-feeliness as a sign of the apocalypse whenever he talked about it – and boy, did he ever talk about it, from zombies to grey goo to, oh, all kinds of globalized extinction events, most of which she can’t remember because she was usually eating dinner at the time and trying not to barf as he talked about the speed of decomposition.

She feels a little sad, thinking about Sheldon. Was he ever normal before Leonard knocked him up? Was Leonard normal, once? It sounds like Howard’s family were all FUBAR from the beginning, but was there ever a time when she’d been sitting in 4A with two regular, if somewhat nerdy, guys? Was Leonard ever looking at her like he wanted to kiss her just because he wanted to kiss her and not because he was considering impregnating her with alien babies?

“Penny, you’re drifting off. Stay with me.” Stuart’s voice is quiet, but urgent.

“It’s not your fault, Stuart. How could we have known this would happen?”

“Leslie and I knew. Wil knew.”

“But specifically the – the bat-thing.”

Stuart shakes his head. “Come on, Penny, you came to me in the first place because you thought I’d understand. I mean, it’s not like if the Avengers tower suddenly materialized and we were dealing with superheroes. I’d be more of an expert on that. But there are still some things that are really obvious rules in this kind of end-of-world scenario–”

“It’s not the end,” Mary puts in.

“–and I broke one of the big ones. You were right. It’s like someone who realizes they’re in a horror movie scenario saying ‘Bloody M–’... well, you know who, into a mirror three times.”

“We’re not in a horror movie scenario, though.”

“Technically, we are. It’s horror science fiction set in the apocalypse sub-genre. Except for the part where it’s crossed the line into non-fiction.”

Penny takes a drink of water, and then says, “You know, now I get why your store is sorted by publisher instead of by genre.”

Wil’s voice crackles over the intercom. “We’re back on track to Staten Island. We’ll be there in maybe an hour.”

Stuart slumps back against the seat, and then pulls out his phone and starts texting. Penny gropes for her own phone, but a bleary glance at the screen tells her that her battery’s nearly dead. Great.

“Stuart, if I give you Raj’s number, can you text him and tell him how far away we are?”

“I have his number,” Stuart says, eyes focused on the screen, and even in the eerie light she can see the pink rise in his cheeks.

“Oh? Do you have _all_ the guys’ numbers?”

“Just his.”

Penny looks up at Missy, who’s looking back down at her, and in that one glance they share an entire conversation about just how dang adorable ( _dang_ is Missy’s word; _adorable_ , Penny’s) Stuart and Raj would be as a couple. Stuart just gets back in his seat so that neither of them can see his phone screen and keeps flicking his thumb over the keyboard.

Leslie comes back out of the cockpit. “Come on, you, you should sit up now.” She helps Penny up off the floor and back into her seat. “We don’t want you falling asleep.”

“I could use a nap.”

“I’m sure you could, but I just want to make sure you don’t have a concussion. I’m not a medical doctor.” Leslie reaches across Penny and fastens her harness, brushing a surprisingly soft kiss over her cheek as she does so.

Every time Penny closes her eyes, either Leslie elbows her or Stuart jostles her shoulder with his, so there’s no chance of her falling asleep. Besides, her head is _pounding_. She ends up asking Leslie for painkillers and Leslie reluctantly gives her a couple of ibuprofen.

“They can’t do any damage,” Penny says.

“I hope not,” Leslie says. “We need every working brain cell available.”

It’s the first time she’s sounded less than confident about the potential that the future holds.

 

Nothing happens for the next forty-two minutes, and then two things happen almost simultaneously: Wil announces their descent toward Staten Island, and something blurs past the windows, temporarily blotting out the darkness with inky blackness.

“Um, guys?” is as far as Penny gets before the plane abruptly tilts _way_ too far over to the left ( _port_. Or Cooper-side) and she is very nearly treated to how it would feel if Wil _did_ loop the loop. Stuart grabs at his safety harness, narrowly escaping being throttled by it, and Leslie braces her feet against the floor and lets out a torrent of swearing.

“There’s somethin’ on the wing,” Missy says far too calmly.

“Is that an emergency exit?” Leslie nods toward a door that appears to open onto the wing.

“Yes, but–”

Leslie unfastens her safety harness, collects her shotgun from underneath her seat, and inches her way over to the door, kneeling within reach of the release handle.

“Stay put, everyone,” she says.

Mary picks up the intercom mic. “Mr. Wheaton, what happens if we open the emergency exit?”

“ _Why_ would you do that?” The plane lurches to the right.

“I think Leslie’s fixin’ to shoot the thing.”

“Oh. Well. Tell her to hold on tight, or she’ll get sucked out.”

Leslie’s already on top of the holding on problem, doing something with a coil of rope and several metal clippy things, hooking herself onto a bar beside the door. Penny unbuckles her own harness. Stuart grabs her arm. Penny shakes him off and crawls over to grab Leslie around the waist.

“You’re nuts, Barbie.”

“I’m your anchor,” Penny informs her.

Leslie passes her a couple of loops of rope. “Just don’t cry too much if I elbow you in the face. The recoil on this is pretty strong.”

Penny just attaches herself to Leslie like a determined blonde limpet. Then she tosses the tail end of the rope to Missy, who winds it around the arm of her seat.

Leslie opens the door.

The rush-suck- _pull_ of air is immediate. Penny tightens her grip on Leslie’s waist. Leslie’s hair blows everywhere and Penny reaches one hand up to pull it back from Leslie’s face. Leslie steadies the shotgun, targeting the bizarre thing clinging to the plane’s wing. Penny gets the impression of a multitude of blinking eyes, something below them that is probably a mouthful of teeth, and wings that unfurl more like a parachute opening than anything else, up and rounding out and–

The bullet takes the thing square in the midsection and it is not blood and guts that splatters everywhere, but something more ephemeral; ghost-gray swirls of something barely tangible that waft upward, and gobbets of black bile-esque muck that spatter over the plane’s pristine white wing. A chunk of something flies toward the engine and Penny has time to yelp in distress before it’s sucked in and disintegrated. Bright red spangles of light bloom into momentary flames.

With the weight suddenly removed from its left wing, the plane merrily spins back to center and beyond. Penny goes sliding across the floor to fetch up against the opposite wall, rope tightening around her thighs. Leslie tumbles against her, clinging to the gun, pointing it away from anyone. A small shower of – _stuff_ – slides down the wing into the cabin.

Missy leans over from her seat and drags the door closed again, gravity working with her.

“I think I ruined your shirt, Stuart,” Penny says in a small voice, looking down at the words that now read _Choose Your_ [smear of unidentifiable gore]. Then she’s rolling again as Wil wrestles the plane back onto a level flight path.

“S, your sister better have enough wine for all of us,” Leslie says.


	8. Chapter 8

Stuart’s sister is sitting in a lounge chair on the roof of her building. It’s raining, but she’s wearing a poncho. The water is creeping up, but she’s built a sandbag wall around the perimeter of the roof. Between that and the selection of wine bottles on the table beside her, Penny thinks she looks pretty well fortified.

The Coopers and Leslie are waiting with the plane back at Linden Airport, which will stay above water a little longer if they’re lucky. Missy has taken on the job of finding fuel. Wil has borrowed a helicopter for the purposes of picking Annie up. Penny has given up questioning Wil’s ability to do random shit like acquiring and flying various aircraft, because in light of the bigger questions about the end of the world it seems pretty irrelevant.

“I don’t know if a rope ladder is the best idea in this weather,” Stuart yells over the sound of the wind. “It needs something to hold it down.”

Penny points at the very solid looking round weights at the bottom of the ladder.

“I know, but the rain... the wind...”

Penny sighs, although she knows he can’t hear it, and triple-checks that the ladder’s top is secure before giving the other end a shove. It falls and unrolls and tangles for a terrifying moment before the wind helpfully nudges it and the weights splash down into a puddle on the roof. Penny, attached to a safety line, scrambles out after it. Annie is already crossing the roof to climb up, a promising glimmer of foil poking out of her backpack.

“Hey!” she hollers over the wind, grinning. “Penny, right?”

“Yes! Come on, let’s get out of here!”

The chopper lurches a little as Annie begins her ascent, and Penny grabs her arm. Stuart is an anxious blur of face at the top of the ladder. Penny doesn’t know if there’s a hand signal for ‘tell Wil to hold steady, for fuck’s sake’, but if he can see her face he probably knows.

They’re halfway up when the black thing comes swooping in, and this time Penny sees it coming in all its revolting glory. It looks like a bat, but a bat with a naked mole rat for a father. A naked mole rat bat, with a severe skin condition. There are membranes and hyperextended limbs and malign eyes.

“At least this one doesn’t have tentacles!”

“What?” Annie yells from somewhere around Penny’s waist.

“Never mind! _Climb_!”

Wil has to jig the chopper a little, attempting to dodge the thing, and Penny almost loses her grip. She feels Annie’s arm go tight around her leg, but Annie’s other hand slips off the rung she’s holding. The ladder shakes some more as Stuart slithers out of the trap door and onto the top of it, carrying a harness.

“Annie, _hold on_!”

She’s fumbling over her shoulder, in her backpack. The thing swoops them and Penny kicks out at it, setting the ladder spinning.

“ _Annie_!”

“Penny! The gun! I can’t reach it!”

Penny sees, then, realizes that glint of metal peeking out of the bag isn’t the foil on a champagne bottle after all, but the muzzle of a pistol. She stretches down, can’t reach, decides _fuck it_ , and hooks her knees through the ladder, and lets go with her hands.

She hasn’t done this upside down thing since she was a kid, doing skin-the-cats on the jungle gym at school. Her t-shirt falls down over her face and she grabs it and shoves it into her waistband.

Then she reaches for the backpack.

It would make a lot more sense for one of the people who _isn’t_ currently hanging upside down off a rope ladder hanging out of a hovering helicopter in a reasonably strong wind and pelting rain to be the one to shoot Batman’s leprous love child.

But this all stopped making sense ages ago, and so Penny aims and shoots and kills.

Not that it’s as simple as that. She aims and then re-aims, misses three shots, but hits with two, and the thing spirals out of the sky and down, down, down into the floodwaters.

“Penny?” Annie says, her voice remarkably calm, her head now level with Penny’s, albeit up the right way.

“Yeah?”

“I meant for you to pass me the gun.”

“Oh well,” says Penny giddily. She tucks it back into Annie’s backpack (it clinks against glass, which makes her smile), and then reaches up and pulls herself back upright. Wil must be monitoring them somehow – camera in the belly of the chopper? – because he turns it carefully away from the apartment building and starts flying back toward Linden.

She kind of wishes she hadn’t left her phone with the Coopers for safekeeping. This would make a _great_ Facebook profile photo.

* * *

“I thought Leslie already killed that thing,” Penny says once they’re all back inside the chopper, the trap door closed, the wind no longer so loud. “Isn’t that the thing she already killed?”

“Yeah, about that...” Stuart shifts uncomfortably, and not just because he’s perched on a coil of rope. “I was thinking about the mythology about H– Him Who Is Not To Be Named, and I remembered that he doesn’t usually come himself. He sends minions, and then if you kill all of them, he _might_ show up himself to see who’s taken his name in vain.”

Annie looks baffled. “You summoned _Voldemort_?”

“Hey, careful. We don’t need a dark wizard all up in our shit as well as everything else,” Penny says.

Stuart laughs, but it sounds fake.

“So how many minions does he have to send? And how much of a chance is there that he’ll show up himself?”

Stuart looks _supremely_ uncomfortable now. “Um...”

“Do you remember which book you read it in? Maybe we can Google it. If the internet still exists.”

“It was in a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, okay?” Stuart rakes his hands through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “Before you say anything, remember that _everything_ out there’s meant to be fictional, so–”

“That’s actually really useful,” Annie interrupts.

“What?”

“Well, if they’re meant to be fictional, then surely someone’s written something about their weak spots?”

“Mmmm... mostly that they don’t have any.”

“I guess it depends on whether they’re here to fight or for something else,” Annie says contemplatively.

“What else would they be here for?” Penny asks.

“Well, Possum said on the phone that one of your friends was pregnant. Maybe they’ve come for the babies.”

Penny thinks about this option for a moment, and then reaches for Annie’s bag.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure you’ve got enough wine for all of us.”

She doesn’t – it’s only two bottles, cushioned by haphazardly packed socks and underwear, mostly – but it’s enough for Penny to start getting enough of a buzz on to not think too hard about Sheldon giving birth, about the thing coming out of the sea for the babies. Surely Pasadena is flooded by now anyway; she doesn’t think anyone could have survived.

But then, she didn’t think that a giant monster-thing with a squid for a head was going to rise out of the ocean, either, and that was totally a thing that happened.

* * *

They make it back to Linden without incident. Missy and Leslie have a fuel line pumping merrily into the plane’s tanks. Mary is sitting in the shelter provided by one of the hangars, well away from the fuel, serenely smoking a cigarette. Bluish smoke plumes up from her mouth, and Penny heads over to join her.

“Where’s your mom?” is the first thing she asks.

“Little girls’ room.” Mary fishes in her dress pocket, finds the packet, offers it to Penny. Penny accepts a smoke and reciprocates with the bottle of wine.

“We ain’t all gonna fit in that plane. Not if we’re pickin’ someone else up as well.”

“Sure we will, we’ll all just squash up.”

“There won’t be enough safety harnesses for everyone. Someone’s gonna get hurt.”

“So Leslie and I sit on the floor and tie ourselves to the wall. It’ll be fine.”

Mary eyes her through the smoke. “You sound pretty eager to be tied to her.”

Penny can feel herself blushing but doesn’t give a fuck. “Your son’s pregnant with tentacle babies. Don’t start judging _me_.”

To her surprise, Mary laughs. “You know, when he first said he was seein’ Leonard as more than a roommate I was too darn relieved that he’d found anyone at all to get too mad that it was a man. But I do draw the line at grandsquids.”

Penny chokes, both smoke and wine jetting painfully out of her nose. “ _Grandsquids_!”

Mary laughs again; it sounds somewhat hollow. “I came up with that one when young Stuart first broke the news to me, but I thought it was a bit heartless to say out loud.”

* * *

It turns out that nobody has to tie anyone to anything (although Leslie makes it clear to Penny that the involvement of rope in their budding relationship isn’t necessarily off the table). Wil assesses the situation and decrees that they need a new, bigger plane. So there’s an hour of ferrying food and supplies into the new plane, checking the fuel tanks and topping them up, and praying that no more bat things come looking for them.

Penny investigates the small airport’s offices and finds a charger for her phone. It’s a huge relief to see the lightning symbol come up on the screen. She’s left behind her purse in Pasadena, she’s not even wearing all her own clothes (at least between the rain and the dangling off a rope ladder in a howling wind, the gory smear is mostly gone from the front of her borrowed t-shirt), and, oh yeah, the world is ending – the phone is one bit of normality to hang on to.

Stuart joins her in the office. “I’m wondering where all the people went,” he says without preamble.

Penny shrugs. “Higher ground?”

“We haven’t seen anyone we weren’t specifically looking for since Texas.” He fiddles with his phone. “I did find out what happened to Nevada, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Statewide cloaking device.”

Penny blinks at him. “Bullshit.”

“Zero bullshit. C’s got some pretty interesting people on the ground down there. And in the air, for that matter.”

“Maybe we should go there once we pick Raj up,” Penny says. “It sounds like they have things under control.”

Stuart looks surprised, and then plants a kiss on her cheek and runs out of the office, yelling for Wil.

“Good job, Barbie,” Leslie says, popping her head around the door. “Maybe we’re not stuck with going to Canada after all.”

“Canada? I thought the plan was to go south.” Penny slouches back in the computer chair and opens her arms.

“Yeah, well, while you were out there doing search and rotgut acquisition, I spent some time on one of these computers plotting flight paths, and the satellite weather is showing some hinky shit.” Leslie sits on Penny’s lap and allows Penny to put her arms around her.

“‘Hinky shit’?”

Leslie nudges the mouse and the computer monitor blinks to life. “Like that.”

Penny looks past her at the screen. There are swirls of white and blue that she thinks are meant to represent rainfall, and then there are splotches of virulent purple that she’s never before seen on the Weather Channel. They’re dotted all over the place, but especially over the Pacific and over the Gulf Coast.

“I see what you mean.”

Leslie nods. “So Nevada might not be the worst idea, after all. I was thinking Ontario–” she indicates a reasonably clear area on the map “–but apart from the _Star Trek_ shit, it’s starting to sound like Nevada might actually be safer.”

“Even though it’s so close to the West Coast?”

“I don’t think we can assume anywhere’s safe just because it’s inland,” Leslie says, pointing at the screen again. Penny observes the purple splotch over Brazil, like Bolivia’s taken to wearing slouchy purple beanies, and doesn’t say anything. Leslie takes advantage of her silence to kiss her, grumbling about the taste of cigarettes and cheap wine, and Penny is grateful for the opportunity to close her eyes, to escape that vision of ominous color that really shouldn’t be there.


	9. Chapter 9

One of the best ways to cope with their current situation (now that they’re out of wine, anyway), Penny decides, is to be a facetious pain in the ass. Specifically to Stuart, regarding Raj, in front of Annie.

“So how come you only have Raj’s number in your phone?” she asks, all but batting her eyelashes.

“What?” Stuart looks like he needs another coffee.

“You said earlier you only had Raj’s number in your phone. I just thought it was weird. I mean, surely Sheldon calls – used to call you at three in the morning with Batman emergencies.”

“Oh. No, this is my personal cell. I have another one for work stuff. This one’s more of a...” He gestures vaguely toward the cockpit, where Wil’s piloting and Leslie’s in charge of keeping him awake. “An eldritch thing.”

“So you have Wil’s number, and Leslie’s. And Raj’s.”

“And yours,” Stuart says, overriding Penny’s next line, which was going to be, _that’s sweet_. “People I was sure weren’t tentacle monsters. Plus a few special contacts around the country, and my family. So whatever you’re trying to imply, knock it off.”

He almost has Penny convinced, but then Annie butts in with, “Raj? Wasn’t he the one you mentioned last time you called me?”

“Maybe.”

“And the time before that?”

“I hate you both,” Stuart informs them, unbuckling his harness and disappearing toward the kitchenette down the back.

“You two are terrors,” Missy says, shaking her head but laughing.

“What?” Annie says. “All I said was that Stu mentioned him one or twenty times.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Per minute.”

“Wasn’t Rajesh one of the guys who came callin’ on me when I was visitin’ with you?” Missy asks Penny.

“He was,” Penny says, her mind drifting back to that night. Missy really had ended up visiting with her; it wasn’t as if there was space at Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment, short of the couch, and she’s pretty sure that Sheldon wouldn’t have let even his sister profane the sanctity of his spot.

“I knew California was a cesspit of sin,” Mary says.

“Oh, hush,” Meemaw – Penny can’t quite fathom calling her anything else – says. “As if you didn’t walk down the aisle with twelve weeks’ worth of baby growin’ in you.” Mary looks scandalized. Missy looks like she’s heard this discussion a time or two before. Penny would love to mention Sheldon’s out of wedlock pregnancy, but she’s sober enough to remember that Meemaw doesn’t know that part. For that matter she’s surprised that Stuart told Mary. On the other hand, she herself did run to him knowing that if anyone could help, it would be him – and that she’d believe him.

Stuart returns from the kitchenette then, carrying take-out style cups that are steaming delectably. The first round goes to the cockpit, making Penny realize that Wil must be running close to empty by now, and then he brings out hot chocolate for the elder Cooper women, but finally he brings hers to her and perches companionably on the arm of her ridiculously plush seat.

“Shouldn’t you be buckled in?”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Mom wouldn’t ask that,” Annie says. “She’d just say if you fall and break your nose to not bleed on the carpet.”

“Harsh!” Missy says.

“Realistic. After the second time he came home with a broken leg from falling out of a tree, she gave up on telling him to be careful and just bought more Band-Aids.”

“And Dad was a bad example. How many times did he lose his eyebrows over the grill?”

“I wonder if they’re okay,” Annie says wistfully.

“I think we should all pray for them, and for all the other poor souls who might have been lost because of all of this,” Mary says.

“Okay.” Penny reaches across the aisle and takes Meemaw’s hand; it’s delicate, fragile. Her other hand finds Stuart’s; his is shaking a little. She’s never really been a believer, but in a world where ancient gods can rise out of the sea, at least trying to get a deity on their side can’t hurt.

At the other end of the row of seats, Annie closes the circle by clasping Missy’s hand.

“Whose father?” Meemaw asks.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven...” Mary starts and the others join in. It takes Penny back to church with her grandmother, Easter and Christmas, and Sunday school lessons that her parents pulled her out of after the second time she snuck out to go play instead.

“We’re approaching Cornell now,” Wil says seconds after their _amen_. He sounds exhausted. “Can one of you call Raj and find out exactly where he is? It’s too damn dark to see anything.”

Stuart makes the call and relays the information that Raj is in the physical sciences building and will put on a laser show. Bare seconds later, red and green lights burst across the sky; they look like something out of _Star Wars_.

“It’s like the Fourth of July,” Missy says.

* * *

Wil uses a nearby straight stretch of road as a runway. How convenient that  _some_ colleges have such gigantic swathes of land to sprawl across. If it had been Caltech they probably would have had to land on Del Mar and walk.

There’s an open door, and Raj waving a flashlight, and they straggle across the wet grass to meet him. She ends up helping Leslie support Wil; he’s dog-tired, drooping. She doesn’t think it’s just from staying awake for so long. There’s more pressure on all of them than just the need for a nap.

“The faculty lounge has couches,” Raj says, waving them in. “There are showers near the radiation lab.” The signs are easy to follow, even in the reluctant yellow glow of the emergency lighting. Penny and Leslie haul Wil into the faculty lounge and settle him on one of the couches; he’s asleep within seconds. Meemaw takes another couch, tucking an aged throw pillow under her head and closing her eyes. Mary curls up in an armchair by her mother’s head.

“Where is everybody?” Annie asks.

Raj shrugs. “Most people who stayed locked themselves in their offices. I don’t think many people stayed, though. There was a hurricane over Michigan that – well, I guess we have a couple more Great Lakes, now.”

“‘And farther below, Lake Ontario/Takes in what Lake Erie can send her’,” Annie quotes.

“Right.”

“We didn’t hear about that,” Leslie says.

“It only lasted fifteen minutes. I guess you’d call it a flash hurricane.”

“Um. Stuart, didn’t you say something about a – one of them that can appear as a storm cloud?” Penny asks.

Stuart walks away from them and starts methodically kicking one of the vending machines, which is answer enough.

“We can’t do anything about it now,” Leslie says, “and I for one like the sound of the showers.” She gives Penny an arch look. “Feel like getting wet, Barbie? You’re still covered in greasy grimy eldritch guts.”

* * *

When they (eventually) return from the showers, clad in clean dry lab coats and carrying their sort of washed clothes, the faculty lounge is full of sleeping people. Penny moves around the room, checking everyone one by one. Wil is still flat out on his couch; Meemaw is sound asleep on hers. Mary is asleep in her chair, and Missy has pulled one up near her; the Cooper family circling the wagons. Annie has also opted for a chair, although since the armchairs are large and plush it’s not a hardship. Raj is stretched out on the third couch, Stuart spooned against him.

“Do you think Facebook still exists?” Penny asks rhetorically, taking a photo for posterity.

“We can’t stay here forever.” Leslie examines the last armchair. “It’s not safe.” She settles into the chair, squeezing over to one side, and pats the seat beside her. Penny sits sideways, draping her legs across Leslie and the arm of the chair.

“I’ll set an alarm,” she says, poking at her phone. “Two hours?”

“Okay. Are you going to be comfortable like that?”

“I’ve had worse.”

Leslie laughs. “God help me, Barbie, but...”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.” Leslie reaches up to tug Penny down into a kiss, which says a lot by itself; it’s slow, thoughtful, less heated. When they part, Penny settles her head on Leslie’s shoulder, and Leslie’s arms go around her.

“Two hours,” Penny says again, yawning.

“It’ll have to be enough.” Leslie subsides into silence, save for muttering something about “fucking flash hurricanes”.

Leslie is right, it’s not the most comfortable position, but Penny feels like she could fall asleep stuffed into a high school locker right now.

* * *

She comes awake some time later; she’s not sure how long. The lounge is still quiet. She’s surprised none of them snore. It’s eerie. There’s a long semi-opaque window at the end of the room and she can hear rain beating against it. Ordinarily it would be a soothing sound but for all she knows it’s the start of the next great flood.

Moving carefully, Penny levers herself off Leslie’s lap. Their clothes are spread out on a table to dry and the guns and her bat are beside them. She picks up the bat, checks that her coat is fully buttoned, and moves toward the window. If she can open it and peek out, see that it’s just rain and the ground is still visible, she’ll be able to snuggle back up with Leslie and nap for however many minutes she has left.

There’s a section of window that opens down one end. Penny unhooks the latch and pushes it outward.

Rain blows in.

Wind blows in.

And she’s slapped in the face with a tentacle.

Penny scrambles to yank the window closed again, but the tentacle snakes its way in, curling back against the glass and pulling. She sees the glass begin to crack and screams Leslie’s name at the top of her lungs, throwing herself across the room, going over tables rather than around them.

There’s a flurry of motion from the circle of couches; Stuart’s on his feet in seconds, scooping one of the rifles off the munitions table and bracing himself against the back of the couch. Raj pops his head up and Stuart snaps at him to get down without even looking. Penny sees the white flash that’s Leslie’s lab coat damn near levitating out of her chair. She wishes she’d grabbed a gun instead of her bat, but the tentacle has been joined by a second tentacle and they have pulled the glass right out of the frame, leaving just a few shards adhering to the metal.

Then it – he – it is coming into the room, and there’s no time to change weapons.

She doesn’t know why she thinks _he_ when it has no discernable features to indicate gender. It is tall, robed in yellow, hovering. Tentacles writhe and whip back and forth below the trailing hem of the robe. The hood is pulled forward and low over the thing’s head, and she can only see darkness beneath it.

“Don’t look at his face,” Stuart says. His voice is trembling but his stance is rock solid. “Don’t look.”

“Weak spots?” Leslie asks.

“Just fucking _shoot_.”

The yellow-robed thing is moving toward them. Leslie puts three rounds into what Penny supposes is the thing’s stomach. It doesn’t so much as twitch. Penny now has zero confidence that her bat is going to do any good.

“Run,” Stuart says.

“What?”

He elbows her. “ _Go_! Get them out of here!” Then he chambers a round in the rifle and shoots. The more powerful weapon knocks the thing back a few steps (slithers?). A gobbet of something that may or may not be saliva flies out from underneath the thing’s cowl, and sizzles against the shoulder of Stuart’s leather jacket.

“Possum–” Leslie and Annie say in unison.

Penny goes over the back of the couch, dropping the bat, grabbing Raj by the collar. “Move! Move! _Move_!” Missy is already herding Mary and Meemaw toward the door out to the hallway. Annie’s frozen, staring at her brother, who calmly shoots the thing again. Penny catches her arm on the way past. Wil dodges past them, his target the gun table, but Leslie’s already there, exchanging her handgun for the second rifle.

“Get them right out, Penny,” she says, her eyes locking on Penny’s for a split second.

Then Penny has to focus on the doorway, and on getting her struggling charges through it. Raj is still stunned, but Annie’s actively fighting her.

“You can’t do anything!” Penny yells at her. “We have to go!”

Wil comes up behind them and helps her hustle the two of them out. He pulls the door shut behind them, closing it on the sound of gunfire.

“We need to head straight for the plane,” he says, looking haggard in a way that can’t be attributed just to the lack of sleep.

“Are you kidding? Not without my brother,” Annie says, reaching for the door.

Wil yanks her away. “ _Yes_ , without your brother.”

Penny sees the dreadful understanding crashing in on Annie’s face, and on Raj’s, and knows it’s on hers as well.

She is not prepared to be the last one standing, swinging her bat in the face of the unknown, while the two people who got her safely out of Pasadena are – well, whatever.

Of all the things to come to her then, two memories bubble up: one of sitting in the back of chem class back in Nebraska, doodling hearts in her notebook, working out love numerology with her name and her crush’s, ignoring the actual chem equations; the other of watching the boys growing blue crystals in petri dishes on their kitchen bench.

“That thing in there spits acid. Is there something that neutralizes acid that we could maybe try to get into it? Or onto it?”

“A base,” Raj and Annie say in unison.

“Okay, sure. What’re some common bases, then?” Penny asks.

Wil shrugs. “Uh. Home?”

Annie smacks his arm. “Go on, you. Get everyone out of here. We’ve got this.”

Wil raises an eyebrow at her, but gets, ushering the others down the hallway. Raj doesn’t move straight away.

“Raj, go,” Penny says.

“I should be helping you.”

“Hey, I got from Pasadena to here without you. You know who needs you? Wil. He’s got his hands full with three Cooper women. Go help him.”

“Fine,” Raj concedes, casting one last look at the closed lounge door before following the others away.

Meanwhile, Annie’s examining a map on the wall across from the door. “We need to find some stairs to get to the chemistry lab we need,” she says, pulling a Sharpie out of her pocket and scribbling directions onto her arm.

Penny’s well trained for this just from going up and down to her apartment. She follows Annie’s lead, and before long they’re in a storeroom the likes of which would have been all kinds of locked at her high school; either college students are more trustworthy or someone ran off without closing the door.

Annie scans the shelves, pulling on a pair of long white rubber gloves as she does so, and then makes a satisfied noise when she finds the substance that she’s after. “Don’t touch this stuff,” she says, dumping white crystals out of the large mason jar into several smaller jars and screwing the caps on tightly.

“Why not?”

“You ever see _Fight Club_?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Chemical burn,” Annie says, capping the last little jar and beginning to stow them in Penny’s coat pockets. “You get this on you and get it wet, you’ll be in all kinds of pain.”

“Okay, boss. How do you know this stuff?”

“Chem’s a prerequisite for any medical course. I'm - I _was_ a year off being a doctor.” Annie strips the gloves off and flicks them across the storeroom into the sink. She pulls down another bottle.

“What’s that?”

“Vinegar. Just in case.”

* * *

They get back to the faculty lounge as fast as possible. Annie stuffs the vinegar bottle into the front of her sweater and pulls two of the little jars out of one of Penny’s pockets.

“As soon as we get in there, find the guy in yellow and throw. Hard. We need them to smash on him. How’s your aim?”

Penny thinks back to age nine, her hair in pigtails, digging one battered sneaker toe into the dirt of the pitcher’s mound. “Pretty good.”

“Good. Are you–” Annie stops. “Something’s wrong.”

“Well, yeah, the world’s been overrun by monsters.”

“No, I mean...” Annie gestures at the door. “Hear that?”

Penny’s poised to say no, she doesn’t hear anything, and then realizes that that’s the problem.

The gunfire has stopped.


	10. Chapter 10

Penny flings the door open with one hand, the other poised to throw one of the little jars as soon as she can see the fucker.

She sees it, hovering perhaps uncertainly near the window. The only reason she can think of for it to do that is that it’s run out of targets, that the other two – but she can’t think about that.

Now it has two nice new targets.

Her first throw almost goes wild, except that the thing in yellow moves – to dodge? – and so she clips its hip. The jar doesn’t break. She can see several tears in the yellow draperies that ooze with yellow goop. Blood, or something else? She can also see Stuart sprawled awkwardly over the back of the couch that he and Raj were sharing not so long ago, his rifle lying discarded on its seat. The smears on his t-shirt are most definitely blood. She can’t see Leslie anywhere.

“Harder than that!” Annie says, and Penny winds up her next throw.

This one connects with the thing’s chest, but the jar still doesn’t break. Penny bites her lip, frustrated.

“Again, Barbie!”

Penny snaps her gaze to the left. Leslie’s behind an overturned table, rising to her feet, into a classic shooter’s stance, gripping one of the handguns. For a second Penny doesn’t get it.

Then she does.

“ _Pull_!” she yells, aiming high, and Leslie’s bullet catches the jar at the top of its arc, shattering it, showering rough white crystals all over the yellow-clad thing.

The shriek it lets out is literally unearthly. She can see the white lumps sticking to the yellow ichor. There’s smoke rising off them. It smells of rotten eggs.

“Annie!” She steps further into the room so that Stuart’s sister can take her turn.

“Pull!” Annie bowls underarm. Leslie shoots. More crystals shower down on the thing at the far end of the room, like corrosive snow. The shrieking is rapid, constant, like a fire alarm. Penny can see clear liquid beginning to gush from the thing’s wounds.

Then it reaches up, grasping at its hood.

“Don’t look!” Penny yells, mindful of Stuart’s warning. “Don’t look at its face!”

“One more!” Leslie yells back. “It’s _working_!”

Penny shoves Annie down behind a handy chair as the thing hucks a chunk of yellow shit at them, and feels her right shoulder catch fire. Not literally, she realizes, looking at where the yellow goop is soaking through her lab coat, but, fuck, it feels that way. The rotten egg smell is stronger around her now. She lifts her arm anyway, her nerves screaming, and hurls another jar. Leslie coolly shoots it, and then less coolly abandons her cover and leaps over the furniture.

“Move, move,” she’s saying, her words piercing through the pain. “Barbie, _now_ , unless you want to lose your arm.”

That doesn’t sound too appealing. Penny goes where Leslie leads her, stumbling around chairs and tables to the bench along one side of the room, to the sink. Leslie fills a jug with water, squirting dish soap into the bottom first, and dumps the bubbly mix over Penny’s shoulder, holding her down over the sink as she struggles against the pain.

The yellow stuff washes away in clots, some stained with red. Leslie pours another jug, and another. Penny keeps trying to lift her head, but Leslie leans on her back, keeping her put. Either they’re safe enough from the thing in yellow to take this time to recover, or Leslie’s turned into a mindlessly overprotective idiot. Penny highly doubts it’s the latter.

She realizes the siren shriek of the thing is winding down. She catches a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye and gets her head up long enough to see Annie picking up the baseball bat and – well. If the thing’s head were a ball, it would be out of the park. As it is there’s a sickening crack and the top of the yellow robes flops back as if on a hinge that just gave way.

“Stay _down_ ,” Leslie grumbles, flicking the back of her head.

“Ask again later,” Penny retorts a little dizzily.

The burning is receding. Leslie helps her ease the lab coat off, keeping the stained part from touching her anywhere else. She’s left in nothing but her underwear, which is okay because at least it got a wash in the shower. (Before Leslie pulled it off her and threw it into a corner.) Her clean clothes are probably kind of dry by now.

But first–

Annie is whaling on the yellow thing, the bat rising and falling rhythmically. There’s not much left of it _to_ whale on. There’s a puddle of clear liquid, a mound of white powder with vague curving lines coming off it that might once have been tentacles, and the scrappy yellow robes. They don’t even have to worry about looking at its face any more, because Annie has thoroughly caved it in.

She’s saying something with each stroke. It takes Penny a moment to puzzle out that it’s Stuart’s name.

“Is he–”

Leslie shakes her head. “I don’t know. It hit him with a couple of tentacles and he went flying. I think it thought he was dead. I thought he–” She swallows convulsively. “I _hid_ , Penny, I–”

“You saved your life,” Penny says, “and then you saved mine.” She can see how raw the flesh on her shoulder is. It’s going to hurt to put anything on over it. “Putting yourself in its way just in _case_ he was okay–”

“But still.” Leslie runs a dish towel under the water, wrings it out, and pats Penny’s shoulder. “It was just us two to start with. I always thought – I didn’t think I’d outlive him.”

“We’ll take him with us.” Penny ignores her clothes for the moment, crossing the room to Annie, who has dropped to her knees and is sobbing, the bat on the floor beside her. “Come on, sweetie. Come on. We have to go.” She crouches beside Annie and puts an arm around her shoulders.

“This isn’t _fair_ ,” Annie says.

Penny knows all about unfair. Unfair is what has been happening to her for the last – she doesn’t even know how many hours it’s been now. It’s impossible to believe that it hasn’t been days, weeks even.

“I know,” she says. “But we’re going to get out of here and go somewhere safe.”

Leslie joins them and offers both of them a hand, murmuring, “Mind the glass, Barbie.”

Annie accepts Leslie’s hand up. “I find it hard to believe that _anywhere_ is safe.”

 _Me too_ , Penny thinks.

That’s when Stuart stands up.

“Fucking hell,” he mumbles, planting his feet, swaying a little. He blinks a few times and then his gaze settles on Penny, his eyes going wide. “Uh, you’re, uh, kind of _really_ naked.”

“ _Stuart_?” Penny says.

“Yeah?”

Annie pelts across the short distance between them and throws herself into her brother’s arms. Stuart embraces her, mouthing _what the hell_ over her shoulder at Leslie, who responds by pointing at him and then slashing her finger across her throat.

* * *

It turns out that he was just knocked out by smacking his head on the arm of the couch after getting soundly tentacle-whipped. Annie stops crying and finds a first-aid kit, cleaning and bandaging the long bleeding weals across his stomach and chest. She does Penny’s shoulder next, applying antiseptic cream and bandages, the familiar procedures clearly soothing her nerves. Penny can’t quite get back into her borrowed t-shirt; the bulky bandage gets in the way. Leslie borrows the kit’s scissors and snips one of the sleeves off so that she can still have some coverage.

“Sorry,” Penny says to Stuart.

“Oh, it’s all right, you never know who I might pick up with the off the shoulder look.” He puts his own t-shirt back on, despite the bloodstains, and goes to clean the smears of yellow off his jacket.

“I think we know exactly who he’d pick up,” Leslie says, loud enough to carry over to the sink. Stuart flips her the bird over his shoulder.

Penny grins and finishes getting dressed; her jeans are clammy and cool but not intolerable. Her socks are actually worse, squelching into her sneakers. The t-shirt, being thin cotton, has dried all the way. She manages to shrug into her leather jacket, which is a little roomier across the shoulders, without it being too painful.

Leslie watches her until she’s done, and then ditches her lab coat in favor of her own clothing. Stuart turns around from the sink just in time to see it hit the floor and suddenly takes a profound interest in the vending machines. Penny stifles a snicker. Annie giggles, the sound high-pitched with relief.

“I think this was easier when you all thought I was dead,” Stuart says, still pretending he’s fascinated by the Coke machine.

“No, it was _horrible_ ,” Annie protests.

“Easier on _me_ , I meant.”

Leslie, clothed, marches past him and delivers a kick of her own to the vending machine, which obediently spits a can out at her.

“Soda, anyone?”

* * *

After Leslie applies the one-shoe discount a few more times, the quartet finally exit the building, laden with soda and candy and chips. For those of them who haven’t slept properly, the caffeine and sugar will fuel them a little longer.

Leslie is the only one not carrying junk food; she’s retrieved their guns instead.

“But we ran out of ammo,” Stuart says around a mouthful of Tootsie Roll.

“If you want to tell Mercy Cooper that we left her family rifle behind just because we ran out of ammo, give me fair warning so I can sell tickets,” Leslie says.

* * *

The others are waiting by the plane.

“I didn’t think you were going to make it,” Wil says with obvious relief, negotiating his way around Leslie’s arsenal and Penny’s sugar supplies to hug them each in turn. He pauses a second at Annie and she hands off her soda and chips to Missy and lets him hug her. The end of the world is no time to be fussy about where hugs are coming from, as long as they don’t involve tentacles.

Then she turns her head and sees how Raj has his arms wrapped around Stuart, basically like _cradling_ him, and how Stuart’s head is tucked into the curve of Raj’s neck, and decides that maybe she could stand to be a little fussier, because that’s just too adorable for words. (For now. She’ll save it for when they’re on the plane.)

She also decides that she’s not going to crack any jokes about how they found Stuart bent over the couch, although she can think of a couple, because there’s black humor and then there’s dangerously close to gravedancing.

Mary’s smoking again. Penny joins her as the others make their way into the plane. She has to hold the cigarette left-handed; her right arm has very definite thoughts about its current range of motion.

“I prayed that you’d get out all right,” Mary says.

“I appreciate it.” Penny drags deep on the cigarette. She no longer has any sense of what time it is, only that the sky is dark and the stars are few. Soon they’ll be flying west again and the time will only change more, so she can’t muster up the effort required to care.

“There’s a long road yet to travel.”

“Yeah. But, you know, I feel like we’ve made it this far... we can make it the rest of the way.”

Mary flicks the cigarette butt to the ground and steps on it daintily. “I have mixed feelings about Nevada.”

“Oh, we won’t be anywhere near the casinos,” Penny assures her, finishing her own smoke and then offering Mary a hand up into the plane. “Although they’re probably not doing much business right now.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“We’ll find out when we get there.” Penny ushers her to her seat. Wil is already up front; apparently, so is Missy.

“He wanted someone with good spatial sense who hadn’t just been beating up an elder god,” Leslie explains when Penny asks.

“I see.” Penny checks on the others one by one. Meemaw is relaxing in her big chair, a can of soda and a bag of pretzels nearby. She has her broken-down rifle across her knees and is methodically checking it for damage. Annie has moved across the aisle to what Penny still thinks of as the Cooper side of the plane, presumably to make room for Raj, although it’s somewhat pointless since Stuart and Raj are occupying the same seat.

“You two sharing Tootsie Rolls?” Penny asks.

Stuart just flickers his tongue at her in response, and for a long moment she really regrets that they only made it to their second date.

“Don’t be so crass, Penny,” Raj says, sounding wounded.

The engines fire up.

“Pilot says buckle up, everyone,” Wil says over the loudspeaker. Penny sits down. Leslie glares at Stuart until he gets off Raj’s lap and buckles into his own seat.

“We’re not losing you to a broken goddamn neck from falling off his lap mid-takeoff,” she informs him.

“We’re not losing _anyone_ ,” Penny says.

“Oh, here.” Leslie passes Penny’s bat to her. “I wiped it off on your coat, but be careful.”

Penny runs her hand over the dent-dappled wood. “Thanks.” It’s funny; she kept it as home protection in Pasadena but also as a kind of nostalgic nod to her childhood; now it’ll always make her think of fighting a tentacle beast clear across the continent.

“Okay, guys, let’s get this show on the road. I hope you brought gum; I want to build altitude fast and get over these clouds.” Wil still sounds tired. Penny is trying not to mentally calculate the flying time between New York and Nevada.

Mary passes out sticks of minty gum. Everyone double-checks their seatbelts. The engines’ sound pitches higher, and then they’re moving, rolling along the road, the moment when the wheels leave the ground almost imperceptible except that Penny feels her stomach drop. Leslie’s hand finds hers. Their fingers link on the arm of her seat. The plane levels out, and Penny has time to see the first hints of sunrise creeping in from the east before she succumbs to exhaustion.


	11. Chapter 11

They end up having a layover in Nebraska because Wil needs to sleep. Penny takes the opportunity to call home. Nobody answers on the home number, or on their cells; she leaves messages on them all.

They’re nowhere near Omaha anyway. The only reason she knows they’re in Nebraska at all is that Wil says so. They’re further west, where the roads have numbers for names and everything’s flat and green or gray.

Wil and Missy both sleep; Missy curled up in one seat, Wil draped over two. Annie and Meemaw opt to stay in the plane. Mary reloads the Cooper shotgun and settles herself on the steps that fold down from the passenger bay door. As Penny, Leslie, Stuart, and Raj wander away from the plane, she starts singing to herself.

The sun is rising again here, creeping fingers of light through the sullen black clouds. The four of them don’t talk much, just wander along the road that Wil has used as a landing strip. It’s flanked by cornfields; they pass a solitary scarecrow that looks at them with black **X** eyes.

“It’s like everyone vanished,” Raj says.

“Nah, this is pretty normal,” Penny says. She wishes she had a truck to drive, just for a while, just to see the road unspool beneath its tires and feel the breeze in her hair instead of the carefully regulated temperature inside the plane. “The population out here is something like five people per square mile.”

“What’s Pasadena, five people per square foot?”

“Probably.”

“Not any more,” Stuart puts in.

Raj shakes his head. “I can’t believe it’s all gone.”

“We don’t know,” Penny says.

“We know enough,” Leslie says. “Don’t get his hopes up.”

The corn gives way to a dusty front yard and an old weatherboard house. There’s a tree in the yard with an aged length of rope dangling from it; the deep hollow in the dirt beneath it speaks of a deceased tire swing. There are two porch swings creaking a little; they too look as if they’ve seen a great many years.

“If there are any creepy cultist children hanging out here, now would be a good time to show yourselves,” Stuart says, pitching his voice to carry.

The corn rustles a little in the breeze, but that’s it.

“Good.” Stuart sits down on one of the porch swings; Raj promptly sits beside him.

“How do you know nobody’s home?” Leslie asks.

“No car,” Penny says. “Plus, you get this close to someone’s house out here, either they come out to say hi or they send their dog out to say get the fuck off my property.” She settles in the other porch swing. Leslie glances at her and then, with a hand on the gun at her hip, knocks on the front door.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you, Barbie. I just don’t want our backs unprotected.”

Penny rolls her eyes and stands back up. “Let me cover your stupid ass then, just in case you get attacked by cockroaches.”

They do a quick circuit of the house – which is too small to hide any of the things they’ve been dealing with, really – and then Leslie “Ulterior Motive” Winkle nudges Penny back in the direction of the bedroom.

“What if the guys come in?” Penny asks, already wriggling her sore arm out of the jacket sleeve.

“ _Please_. Give them five minutes to figure out we’re not coming back and they’ll probably break the chains on that glider.” Her words are rough but her hands, as she helps Penny slip the jacket and then the t-shirt off, are gentle.

The predicted five minutes later, the two of them happen to both be quiet enough to hear the creak of chains out the front, the crack of something giving way abruptly, and then Stuart laughing helplessly while Raj voices a complaint about bruising.

“Should we go check on them?” Penny wonders.

“We could, or we could stay right here.”

Leslie’s mouth is awfully persuasive, and not only for the words coming out of it.

* * *

They reconvene in the front yard some time later. Raj and Stuart are both unrepentantly covered in dust and corn husks, clothing askew, and eyes bright. Penny knows from the way Raj eyes the top of her head and smirks that she is not without suspicious evidence either.

“Let’s get back to the plane,” Leslie says. “Not that I doubt your sister’s ability to help defend it, but I’d like a status update.”

“Annie, defending the plane?” Stuart shakes his head.

“You didn’t see her baseball bat skills,” Penny says.

They wander back along the road, which is a good deal brighter now, the sun determinedly struggling through the clouds. The plane is a bright silver glint up ahead.

Mary’s still sitting on the steps when they reach the plane, rifle propped up beside her. She’s drinking a tiny airplane serving of orange juice.

“Enjoy your walk?” She looks at them one at a time and Penny’s torn between wondering just how much of a mess her hair actually is, and wondering just how much sound the corn muffles.

“It’s good to be out in the fresh air without anything trying to eat me,” she says.

Raj opens his mouth. Stuart elbows him, muttering, “Not _now_ ,” and Raj closes his mouth again. Mary looks amused. Leslie looks like she’s either going to choke laughing, or choke Raj.

* * *

It’s a little while until Wil and Missy wake back up, but when they do, and Wil’s downed a coffee, the plane takes off again.

“Nevada, ho,” Wil says over the loudspeaker.

Penny dozes again for a little while – saving lives is pretty energy-draining, who knew? – but Stuart and Leslie are both a little punchy and are regaling the others with stories about their time as the low-budget Men in Black, and Raj keeps saying “No _way_!” really loudly.

Eventually she goes up front into the cockpit. Missy and Wil are laughing at something, heads close together, and for a moment she feels like she’s interrupting.

“Penny, hey.” Missy makes room for her in the co-pilot’s chair. “I’ve contacted C and he says they have us on their radar and gave me some directions. They don’t have an airfield, but there’s a red blinking light that’s something of a town icon, and enough space to land in the desert.”

“It says something about how far things have gone to shit that ‘enough space to land in the desert’ sounds good,” Penny says.

“Actually, I could use the extra room,” Wil says. “This plane is starting to push my ability to fly. There’s only so big these things can be before they need more than one pilot.”

Penny considers this for a moment, then says, “Thanks for not telling me that sooner.”

“Yeah?”

“Now I only have to panic for like an hour.”

* * *

The time to descend into Nevada airspace comes a little sooner than Penny expected. One minute they’re flying over dimly visible land, and the next it’s just darkness.

“Strap in, everyone,” Wil says, audibly tense. “I don’t know what’s down there.”

Penny straps in and takes Leslie’s hand.

Black and blacker; dark and darker.

Then they’re down and through, and Penny doesn’t need the announcement from up front, because she can see the blinking red light for herself. Rather than being an ominous warning, it’s more like a beacon of hope.

The sky is dark, but she can see pinprick stars.

The plane banks, circles. Static bursts through the loudspeaker, there and gone. Penny hears Wil swear and Missy hush him.

But there is plenty of space in the desert to land, and although their final touchdown is bumpy, they roll to a safe stop.

* * *

There’s a crowd waiting to greet them. Well, a handful of people, but because they’re strangers it seems like more. Penny is acutely aware that one laboratory shower isn’t enough to get _really_ clean. But they’re all smiling, and there aren’t any tentacles visible; she counts that as a win.

Stuart’s the first one to cross the space between them, apparently focused on one person in particular, presumably his secret contact. That’s when Penny gets her first glimpse of C. He’s wearing a lab coat and a metric shitload of smolder.

“Wow,” says Leslie, beside her. “I think my inner Kinsey scale just tilted back toward zero.”

Penny elbows her.

Greetings are exchanged and the welcoming committee ushers them further into town. There’s a trailer park they can use to start with, and the promise of better housing once there’s been time to make arrangements.

“We do try to treat all newcomers well,” C says. “I know some small towns are wary of outsiders, but this isn’t one of them.”

The trailers are four-person affairs, so that means the Coopers and Annie take one, Stuart and Raj and Wil take the next, and Penny and Leslie have the luxury of one just for themselves.

Penny’s dying for a shower with actual soap that might, if she’s lucky, smell like something other than disinfectant.

But there’s one more thing she wants to do first.

She snags a cigarette from Mary and goes to find a rock to sit on, looking east.

It’s hard to say if this will really be her last stop on this journey. Her parents, Leslie’s parents, Stuart’s parents... they’re all still out there, maybe, and maybe trying to get a message through.

Still, she thinks, the town seems well-equipped with radio towers and phone lines. If there are messages out there, she’ll get them.

If she’s lucky, she’ll be able to answer them.

Leslie comes up beside her and slips an arm around her waist. “What’s on your mind, Barbie?”

“Just thinking about if anyone out there tries to get in touch.”

“We’ll be listening,” Leslie says.

Penny leans her head against Leslie’s, and for a long while she’s just listening to the measured cadence of Leslie’s breathing.

“I’m going to learn to fly the plane,” she says eventually, and Leslie’s laugh is unsurprised.

Overhead, a meteor crosses the lightening sky. They both watch it fall toward the distant, barely differentiated horizon.

“Did you wish?” Leslie asks.

Penny shrugs. “We’re alive. What else is there?”

“Hot running water and actual shampoo,” her pragmatic scientist says.

“You have a point. Five more minutes?”

“What for?”

Penny nods toward the horizon where it’s softly rimmed with orange and pink. “The sunrise.”

Leslie doesn’t question her any further; a pragmatic scientist who can also wish on shooting stars understands the importance of sunrises.

They watch it together, the third sunrise Penny has watched today, heralding the start of a new day.

The first new day after the end of the world.


End file.
